ArticleScientific reports2020
Altruistic food sharing behavior by human infants after a hunger manipulation.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- When development constricts our moral circle.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Culturally-attuned AI: Implicit learning of altruistic cultural values through inverse reinforcement learning.PloS one · 2025Article
- Children in sync: exploring how interpersonal synchrony experience induces cooperation between child peers.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The proximate regulation of prosocial behaviour: towards a conceptual framework for comparative research.Animal cognition · 2024Review
- Ultra-processed foods in a rural Ecuadorian community: associations with child anthropometry and bone maturation.The British journal of nutrition · 2023Article
- Comparative physiological anthropogeny: exploring molecular underpinnings of distinctly human phenotypes.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Variations in limited resources allocation towards friends and strangers in children and adolescents from seven economically and culturally diverse societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Human infants can override possessive tendencies to share valued items with others.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Looking for Commensality: On Culture, Health, Heritage, and the Mediterranean Diet.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Identifying with all humanity predicts cooperative health behaviors and helpful responding during COVID-19.PloS one · 2021Article
- Imitation in Chinese Preschool Children: Influence of Prior Self-Experience and Pedagogical Cues on the Imitation of Novel Acts in a Non-Western Culture.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Importance of body representations in social-cognitive development: New insights from infant brain science.Progress in brain research · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Altruistic behavior entails giving valuable benefits to others while incurring a personal cost. A distinctively human form of altruistic behavior involves handing nutritious food to needy strangers, even when one desires the food. Engaging in altruistic food transfer, instead of keeping the food, is costly, because it reduces the caloric intake of the benefactor vis-à-vis the beneficiary. Human adults engage in this form of altruistic behavior during times of war and famine, when giving food to others threatens one's own survival. Our closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), exhibit notable constraints on the proclivity to engage in such food transfer (particularly chimpanzees), although they share many social-cognitive commonalities with humans. Here we show that in a nonverbal test, 19-month-old human infants repeatedly and spontaneously transferred high-value, nutritious natural food to a stranger (Experiment 1) and more critically, did so after an experimental manipulation that imposed a feeding delay (Experiment 2), which increased their own motivation to eat the food. Social experience variables moderated the expression of this infant altruistic behavior, suggesting malleability.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.