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March 7th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda WEDNESDAY, March 7 (HealthDay News) — Selfish behavior in young
children is linked to incomplete development of a brain region involved in
self-control, according to a new study.
The findings may help explain why young children often have difficulty
controlling selfish impulses, even when they know better, and may lead to
improved ways to promote beneficial social behavior, the German
researchers suggested.
The study, published in the March 8 issue of the journal Neuron,
included children of different ages who played two different games. In one
game, children were asked to share a reward with another child who had to
accept what was offered. In the other game, the recipient had to accept
what the other child offered or neither child received a reward.
The games were designed to test the strategic behavior of the children
making the offer.
“We were interested in whether children would share more fairly if
their counterparts could reject their offers, and to what extent strategic
behavior was dependent on age and brain development,” study author
Nikolaus Steinbeis, of the Max-Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain
Sciences in Leipzig, said in a journal news release.
“We observed an age-related increase in strategic decision-making
between ages 6 to 13 years and showed that changes in bargaining behavior
were best accounted for by age-related differences in impulse-control
abilities and underlying functional activity of the left dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex, a late-maturing brain region linked with self control,”
Steinbeis explained.
The results suggest that selfish behavior in young children may not be
due to an inability to know fair from unfair, but rather the result of an
immature prefrontal cortex that does not encourage generous behavior in
situations where there’s a strong incentive for children to be
selfish.
“Our findings represent a critical advance in our understanding of the
development of social behavior with far-reaching implications for
educational policy, and highlight the importance of helping children act
on what they already know,” Steinbeis concluded. “Such interventions could
set the foundation for increased altruism in the future.”
More information
The American Academy of Pediatrics explains normal child
behavior.
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