Pretty much from the word "go" in a self-centered sort of way.
For empathy to develop, takes a while longer.
From Scientific American, August 2017:
Experiments show that this quality often emerges by the age of 12 months
Children have a reputation for selfishness. Picture a traditional morning-after-Halloween scene: A child is hunched over a huge mound of collected candy while their parent stands by begging them to share their spoils with a younger, less fortunate sibling. The frustrated parent in this scene embodies the common notion that the only way to get children to be fair is to forcibly extract it out of them, like blood from a stone.
After studying children’s fairness behavior for nearly a decade we argue that this reputation is, well, unfair.
We travel to public spaces in different cities and ask children to play a simple game: Two children who do not know each other are paired up and given an unfair distribution of candy. One child gets four candies, the other gets one candy. Here’s where things get interesting. One of the two children—the decider—can accept or reject the allocation. If the decider accepts, both children get their candy. If the decider rejects, both children get nothing. Imagine that, like the Halloween scenario, the child in power gets four and their partner gets one. What will they do?
If you are like most parents watching their children play our game, you probably think the decider will happily accept the four, creating a stark inequality with the peer. Children only focus on getting more for themselves, right? To the surprise and delight of many an unsuspecting parent, children—at least older children—frequently reject this unfair advantage. They are willing to sacrifice their own rewards to prevent someone else from getting the short end of the stick. Getting nothing seems better than getting more than a peer, even a child whom they have just met....
....MUCH MORE
Very related, "Fairness, Capuchin Monkeys and Wall Street":
This is a few years old but contains some good lessons so is probably worth reposting
The speaker, Frans de Waal, is one of the heavyweights of the primate world. Actually, we all are among the heavyweights of the primate world but he's up there with Jane Goodall in the study of primates.
A quick hit via TED:
Possibly related: "Who has a deeper sense of fairness, a mortgage banker or a chimpanzee?"
Probably not related: "Alcoholic killer monkey leaves one man dead and 250 injured...."
Unrelated:
"How scientists taught monkeys the concept of money. Not long after, the first prostitute monkey appeared"
Commodity traders superior to chimpanzees, research shows
I made a serious career track mistake.
Years ago a counselor pointed out that I seemed to have an affinity for animals (It's true. Kids and dogs like me. So do drunks and folks suffering from various psychopathologies).
Had I followed up on her thinking I would now be tenured, trading outside my species and living the grant-proposal dream....
...chimpanzees in nature do not store property and thus would have little opportunity to trade commodities...
