For cottontop tamarin monkeys, the golden rule rules.Though the tiny creatures look more like gremlins than humans, they do seem to share one trait with us: altruism. Tamarins give their partners a tasty treat even when it doesn?t benefit them, and even when their mate had been stingy with them in the past, according to a study published online July 14 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The findings show that altruism blossoms in cultures that divvy up child-care duties, and hint that the human instinct to help others stems from our communal child-care system, said primatologist Charles Snowdon of University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-author of the study.