It Makes a Village: Allomaternal Care and Prosociality

Abstract

We examine the relationship between allomaternal care (i.e., care for children by individuals other than the mother) and prosociality. Motivated by cross-cultural ethnographic evidence, which suggests a positive association between allomaternal care and societal trust, we design an economic experiment to measure the relationship between allomaternal care and cooperative behavior among 820 participants in small scale societies of the Solomon Islands. Our results show that receiving help with child care predicts higher levels of prosociality towards the helper. This relationship remains robust for mothers even after accounting for participant fixed effects, for the nature of the relationship between mother and helper, and for other forms of mutual assistance. Moreover, help from non-relatives is associated with prosociality toward strangers, suggesting an important channel for the development of impersonal prosociality. Strengthening the case for the importance of allomaternal care for human development, we document large socio-cognitive benefits to children who receive care from non-relatives (based on daylong recordings of 197 children analyzed using a multilingually-trained neural network), as well as suggestive evidence of societal-level benefits in terms of economic growth.

Keywords: Allomaternal care, Altruism, Child vocalizations, Dictator game, Reciprocity

JEL Classification: I15, O15, Z13