Today.Az » Weird / Interesting » Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees
21 July 2011 [21:40] - Today.Az
Children as young as three years of age share toy rewards equally with a peer, but only when both collaborated in order to gain them. Katharina Hamann with an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Harvard University and the Michigan State University found that sharing in children that young is a pure collaborative phenomenon: when kids received rewards not cooperatively but as a windfall, or worked individually next to one another, they kept the majority of toys for themselves. One of humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees, did not show this connection between sharing resources and collaborative efforts.
The research is reported in the journal Nature.
Adult humans produce a vast majority of their resources in
cooperative work with others. Moreover, they generally try to distribute
them based on norms of fairness and equity. With regard to children,
previous studies have shown that when adults provide rewards as a
windfall and ask children to share, 3-year-olds behave rather selfishly.
However, the present studies show that even 3-year-olds do take note
of whether or not rewards were produced collaboratively, which in turn
affects their tendency to allocate the toys equally.
Pairs of 2- and 3-year-old children had to manipulate an apparatus in
order to gain toys (marbles). In study 1, they had to pull two ends of a
rope at the same time in order to make a board with the marbles move
towards them. Once the movement was done, children could retrieve the
toys; however, one child received 3 and the other only 1. This was
compared to a windfall situation without any collaborative rope-pulling
but the same distribution of toys.
In studies 2 and 3, children participated either in a collaboration, a
windfall or a parallel work condition, with the latter requiring the
same amount of work input by both children (just as in the
collaboration), but now each child could pull his or her own rope
independently of the other child. In all three studies, three year olds,
and to some degree even two year olds, shared their toys only after a
collaboration but not after individual or no work was carried out.
Therefore, "the ontogenetically first sense of distributive justice
may be that participation in a collaborative effort demands an equal
division of spoils," says Katharina Hamann.
Chimpanzees, however, did not share more often after collaboration
than in a windfall situation. Also in the wild, they only rarely
actively collaborate for subsistence. Therefore, they may not have
evolved a tendency to distribute resources more equally when those
resources result from a collaboration.
"Taken together," Hamann summarizes, "the primordial situation for
human sharing of resources may be that which follows cooperative
activities such as collaborative foraging, when multiple individuals
must share the spoils of their joint efforts."
/Science Daily/
|
