The science of getting along

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

I'm sure every parent could tell a distinctive story about how their children grew. You might well observe, whatever your own views about children, that learning to cooperate is not easy. That very difficulty is, in a way, positive; cooperation becomes an earned experience rather than just thoughtless sharing. As in any other realm of life, we prize what we have struggled to achieve.

The child psychologist Alison Gopnik observes that the human infant lives in a very fluid state of becoming; astonishingly rapid changes in perception and sensation occur in the early years of human development, and these shape our capacity to cooperate. Buried in all of us is the infantile experience of relating and connecting to the adults who took care of us; as babies we had to learn how to work with them in order to survive. These infant experiments with cooperation are akin to a rehearsal, as infants try out various possibilities about getting along with parents and peers. Genetic patterning provides a guide, but human infants (like all young primates) also investigate, experiment with and improve their own behaviour.

Salon.com > Richard Sennett

The science of getting along