title: Children's inequity aversion depends on culture: a cross-cultural comparison.
abstract: Recent work showed the presence of strong forms of inequity aversion in young children. When presented with an uneven number of items, children would rather tend to throw one item away than to distribute them unequally between two anonymous others. The current study examined whether or not this pattern is a universal part of typical development by investigating 6- and 7-year-old Ugandan children. Results revealed that the Ugandan children, in contrast to their U.S. peers, tended to distribute the resources unequally rather than to throw the remaining resource away. This points to cross-cultural differences in the development of children's fairness-related decision making.
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 80802 Munich, Germany. Electronic address: markus.paulus@lmu.de.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Paulus
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D040841:Resource Allocation; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014454:Uganda; D014481:United States
keywords: Cognitive development; Collectivism; Cross-cultural differences; Development; Fairness; Resource allocation