Young Children Share the Spoils After Collaboration

• Published in: Psychological science 2011-02, Vol.22 (2), p.267-273
• Main Authors: Warneken, Felix, Lohse, Karoline, Melis, Alicia P., Tomasello, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis of Variance; Behavioural psychology; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child Behavior - physiology; Child Behavior - psychology; Child development; Child psychology; Child, Preschool; Children; Children & youth; Chimpanzees; Collaboration; Cooperation; Cooperative Behavior; Developmental psychology; Dyadic relations; Egalitarianism; Equality; Experimentation; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Hares; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Jelly candies; Male; Monkeys & apes; Pan troglodytes; Peer Group; Peer groups; Preschool children; Primates; Psychological effects; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reward; Rewards; School age children; Sharing; Social sciences
• ISSN: 0956-7976; 1467-9280
• DOI: 10.1177/0956797610395392

Egalitarian behavior is considered to be a species-typical component of human cooperation. Human adults tend to share resources equally, even if they have the opportunity to keep a larger portion for themselves. Recent experiments have suggested that this tendency emerges fairly late in human ontogeny, not before 6 or 7 years of age. Here we show that 3-year-old children share mostly equally with a peer after they have worked together actively to obtain rewards in a collaboration task, even when those rewards could easily be monopolized. These findings contrast with previous findings from a similar experiment with chimpanzees, who tended to monopolize resources whenever they could. The potentially species-unique tendency of humans to share equally emerges early in ontogeny, perhaps originating in collaborative interactions among peers.