Social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive skills

From A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade. Page 48.

Human children, on the other hand, are inherently cooperative. From the earliest ages, they desire to help others, to share information and to participate in pursuing common goals. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if infants aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help. If the adult pretends to have lost an object, children from as young as 12 months will helpfully point out where it is.

There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are "naturally emerging" in young children, Tomasello writes, meaning that they are innate, not taught. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train their children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not enhanced if the children are rewarded.

A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive skills, at least when compared with apes. Tomasello gave human and chimp children a battery of tests related to understanding the physical and social worlds. The human children, aged 2.5 years, did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

The essence of what children's minds have and chimps' don't is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking, a skill called theory of mind. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a "we" a group that has pooled its talents and intends to work toward a shared goal.