Share and share alike

摘要

The happy tendency to share resources equitably - at least with members of one's own social group - is a central and unique feature of human social life. It emerges, it seems, in middle childhood. Recent experiments have shown that chimpanzees do not take advantage of cost-free opportunities to deliver food to other members of their group. Nor do they prevent others from getting food when they could easily do so. In most situations, our nearest primate relatives seem to be focused exclusively on the food that they themselves might get. In the words of Fehr et al., in a paper on page 1079 of this issue, chimpanzees seem to have no "other-regarding preferences". But human children do. In their study, Fehr et al. found that children aged 7 to 8 will not only provide food for others when it is of no cost to themselves, they will also seek an equal distribution, even in situations where they could potentially take a larger share for themselves (as well as in situations in which they could potentially give a larger share to the 'other').