Why do we feel embarassed for others?

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As recent findings by other researchers from the same institute show, these seem to be restricted to particular situations. Felix Warneken and Mike Tomasello found that children as young as 18 months willingly helped complete strangers. 'The results were astonishing because these children are so young - they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language,' says Warneken. 'But they already show helping behaviour.'

Warneken performed various tasks like hanging clothes on a line, and would drop a clothes peg out of his reach. For the first 10 seconds he reached for the peg. In the next 10 seconds he also looked at the child. After 20 seconds he said 'my peg!'. But he never directly asked the child for help, and did not thank or reward the child if the peg was retrieved. Virtually all children helped at least once in these situations and in 84% of cases they helped during the first 10 seconds, before Warneken even made eye contact.

'The children didn't fetch the peg automatically because in another part of the test I threw it on the ground deliberately and they didn't pick it up. They only gave it to me if they inferred that I needed the peg to complete my goal, in this case, hanging up the clothes.'

In case picking up clothes pegs was something the children had experienced before, Warneken invented new and more complicated situations. One was a box with a flap to retrieve objects inside the box. Warneken accidentally dropped a spoon inside and pretended he didn't know about the flap. Again, the children only helped Warneken retrieve the spoon if he was struggling to get it, as opposed to when Warneken threw the spoon inside deliberately.

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But is helping unique to humans? A recent study by Jensen and colleagues [1] shows that chimpanzees only care about themselves when the goal is to retrieve food. However, chimpanzees might help in situations other than foraging. Therefore, Warneken conducted the same helping tasks also with human-raised chimpanzees. Although the chimpanzees didn't help in the more complex tasks, like the box experiment, they did help when their human caretaker was reaching for something.

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Altruism in chimpanzees may mean our common ancestor already had rudimentary forms of helping behaviour before chimpanzees and humans split six million years ago.

'People thought helping behaviour was unique to humans, but maybe chimps aren't as different as we thought,' says Warneken with a smile. 'Perhaps there was a tiny bit of altruism in our evolutionary ancestor and it's grown so much stronger in modern humans.'

Well I can only speculate. So, borrowing from the ideas of Constantine, I would say a complex form of mimicry has evolved to help our forebears, and hence us, to cope with the demands of a collaborative group. A strong emotional response to an event (someone else under stress) that indirectly concern an individual can be a more effective way to prepare that person to successfully tackle a similar situation in a near future.

Interesting question and an even more interesting response from Constantine. Good job fellas.

I'll also add that putting ourselves into the shoes of someone else, even for a brief moment, help us to learn by mimicry. So if this mechanism is innate to a human being, it would seem normal that we would empathise with someone that is placed in an awkward and stressful situation, for it allows us to experience an event without being directly involved.

Not all individuals will feel the need to associate with the entity that has been placed under stress, especially if the individuals in question are well acquainted with the scenario.