title: Fair Is Not Fair Everywhere.
abstract: Distributing the spoils of a joint enterprise on the basis of work contribution or relative productivity seems natural to the modern Western mind. But such notions of merit-based distributive justice may be culturally constructed norms that vary with the social and economic structure of a group. In the present research, we showed that children from three different cultures have very different ideas about distributive justice. Whereas children from a modern Western society distributed the spoils of a joint enterprise precisely in proportion to productivity, children from a gerontocratic pastoralist society in Africa did not take merit into account at all. Children from a partially hunter-gatherer, egalitarian African culture distributed the spoils more equally than did the other two cultures, with merit playing only a limited role. This pattern of results suggests that some basic notions of distributive justice are not universal intuitions of the human species but rather culturally constructed behavioral norms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany mschaefer@eva.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Marie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schäfer
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Department of Psychology, University of Jena.
authors.forename: Daniel B M
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Haun
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D007630:Kenya; D008297:Male; D009276:Namibia; D012201:Reward; D012935:Social Justice
keywords: children; cross-cultural differences; distributive justice; equity; morality; peer interactions