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.
Developmental science