CPO researcher Felix Warneken explores the roots of human cooperation on AADL.TV
October 26, 2021
Felix Warneken
Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) faculty associate Felix Warneken discusses “What Children and Chimpanzees Reveal about the Origins of Human Cooperation” on the AADL.TV series “Exploring the Mind.”
The episode, which was a collaboration between the Ann Arbor District Library and the University of Michigan department of psychology, explores the evolutionary origins of human cooperation. It also examines the factors that shape them during child development.
“What I want to present today is not just speculation but some psychological research that shows that very early on, already in toddlerhood and infancy, kids have cooperative behaviors,” Warneken says. “These early cooperative tendencies broaden over development so that kids start out doing these kinds of things in more limited domains. But it broadens across more situations and kids also become able to make the right kinds of decisions when cooperating with others.”
Warneken is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan.