Project description
What makes us decide who to ask for help?
What goes through our minds when we ask for help? How do we decide who to turn to? While insight into the helper has often been sought by scientists, there has been very little research on the person being helped. The EU-funded HelpSeeking project will focus on this little-studied aspect and explore the development and evolution of human strategic help-seeking with human children and chimpanzees. It will investigate whether the help-seeker’s decision is influenced by any physical effort or material sacrifice the helper will have to make, or by a relationship of friendship or dominance between helper and help-seeker. The project will be the first to provide insight into the evolutionary and developmental roots of strategic help-seeking.
Objective
Human altruistic helping has deep evolutionary and developmental roots: Both human children and our closest non-human relatives - chimpanzees - often pay a cost to benefit another individual. Previous research on helping has nearly exclusively focused on the helper, i.e. the individual providing the help. However, helping also involves someone who is being helped. A helpee is not just a passive recipient of help, but someone who can actively and flexibly increase the chances of being helped, for example by being strategic in whom to ask for help. When determining who is willing to help, two questions are of particular relevance: (a) How costly is it for the potential helper to help? (b) What is my relationship with the potential helper? Considering the costs of and one’s relationship to potential helpers is crucial when soliciting help. Although it can significantly improve an individual's fitness, it has never been studied systematically when it evolved in our evolution and how it develops over ontogeny. Thus, unraveling the phylogenetic and ontogenetic roots of human’s strategic help-seeking is the objective of the proposed project. Therefore, I would like to conduct two interdisciplinary projects with human children and chimpanzees. In Project 1, I will investigate whether considering the costs of potential helpers for providing help influences the decision whom to ask for help, with costs operationalised either as physical effort (Study 1) or material sacrifice (Study 2). In Project 2, I will study the effects of social relations to the potential helpers on the help-seeking desision, considering in particular friendship (Study 3) and dominance (Study 4). Using an innovative approach – combining observations of naturally occurring behaviors and carefully controlled experiments – this project will be the first to provide insight into the evolutionary and developmental roots of strategic help-seeking.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.3. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
MAIN PROGRAMME
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H2020-EU.1.3.2. - Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2018
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
37077 GOTTINGEN
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.