Dorsa Amir

The other person gets one.

Even though they have more and it's unfair, it's unfair in their favor.

They don't seem to be that averse to that decision.

But as they get older, in some cultures, it turns out that accepting a distribution like that is not the nice thing to do.

In fact, we found that we talked in addition to testing kids in these tasks, we also talked to other kids in the community and we talked to adults in the community.

And what turns out happening is that what the adults say is the right thing to do is actually where children's behavior starts guiding them.

And so even though different adults disagree about what the right thing to do is, it seems that children are going through this process in very similar ways and are integrating the local norms of their culture.

And the way we talk about it in the paper is there are just many different routes to cooperation.

And to be a good cooperator in one society just has different norms attached to it.

And children seem to be really sophisticated at learning and integrating that information into their behavior through middle childhood.

Yeah, this is so interesting, this idea of fairness.

So we all, I think, share this sense that some things are unfair and some things are not.

But it turns out that this is quite culturally variable.

And I and my colleagues and lots of other researchers in this field have published and experimented in this space of when we say something is fair, that's actually often a culturally constructed idea.

Fair is not fair everywhere is another way to put it.

And so what we really wanted to do in this study is take those cultural assumptions out.

And just again, instead of testing kids and coming back home and pontificating about what they did, we really wanted to contextualize what we were seeing in their actual communities.

And so we had participants and researchers and researchers.

children and adults of all ages tell us.

And we had these interviews where we explain the situation and we really wanted to learn what they thought.