Reply to Warneken: Social experience can illuminate early-emerging behaviors.

We admire the groundbreaking work of Felix Warneken and thank him for his questions about our report (1), which builds upon his work. Warneken acknowledges that early human helping is a “rich social interaction embedded in the context of social experiences more generally” (2). According to his past writings, Warneken simply does not believe that this rich social context plays a role in the emergence of early altruism: “Infants show altruistic tendencies at an age when socialization could not yet have had a major impact on their development” (3). Our research does not speak to possible biological contributions to altruism, but it does …