Native Amazonian children forego egalitarianism in merit-based tasks when they learn to count

• Main Authors: Jara-Ettinger, Julian (Contributor), Kidd, Celeste (Author), Piantadosi, Steve (Author), Gibson, Edward A. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley Blackwell, 2015-11-23T12:43:33Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 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.