Native Amazonian children forego egalitarianism in merit-based tasks when they learn to count.
Cooperation often results in a final material resource that must be shared, but deciding how to distribute that resource is not straightforward. A distribution could count as fair if all members receive an equal reward (egalitarian distributions), or if each member's reward is proportional to their merit (merit-based distributions). Here, we propose that the acquisition of numerical concepts influences how we reason about fairness. We explore this possibility in the Tsimane', a farming-foraging group who live in the Bolivian rainforest. The Tsimane' learn to count in the same way children from industrialized countries do, but at a delayed and more variable timeline, allowing us to de-confound number knowledge from age and years in school. We find that Tsimane' children who can count produce merit-based distributions, while children who cannot count produce both merit-based and egalitarian distributions. Our findings establish that the ability to count - a non-universal, language-dependent, cultural invention - can influence social cognition.
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT, USA. jjara@mit.edu.
Julian
0000-0002-6167-1647
J
Jara-Ettinger
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT, USA.
Edward
E
Gibson
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, USA.|Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, USA.
Celeste
C
Kidd
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, USA.
Steve
S
Piantadosi
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007199:Indians, South American; D019359:Knowledge; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D012201:Reward; D066270:Social Capital; D012941:Social Responsibility