title: Young children share the spoils after collaboration.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Harvard University, University, Department of Psychology, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. warneken@wjh.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Felix
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Warneken
authors.forename: Karoline
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lohse
authors.forename: Alicia P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Melis
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D010379:Peer Group; D012201:Reward