This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values.

(213 words)To what extent do early intuitions about ownership depend on cultural and socioeconomic circumstances? We investigated the question by testing reasoning about third party ownership conflicts in various groups of three-and five-year-old children (N=176), growing up in seven highly contrasted social, economic, and cultural circumstances (urban rich, poor, very poor, rural poor, and traditional) spanning three continents. Each child was presented with a series of scripts involving two identical dolls fighting over an object of possession. The child had to decide who of the two dolls should own the object. Each script enacted various potential reasons for attributing ownership: creation, familiarity, first contact, equity, plus a control/neutral condition with no suggested reasons. Results show that across cultures, children are significantly more consistent and decisive in attributing ownership when one of the protagonists created the object. Development between three and five years is more or less pronounced depending on culture. The propensity to split the object in equal halves whenever possible was generally higher at certain locations (i.e., China) and quasi-inexistent in others (i.e., Vanuatu and street children of Recife). Overall, creation reasons appear to be more primordial and stable across cultures than familiarity, relative wealth or first contact. This trend does not correlate with the OWNERSHIP REASONING IN CHILDREN OF 7 CULTURESRecent cross-cultural research indicates that market integration (i.e. average number of calories purchased per capita) and affiliation with a large world religion predict individuals' propensity to be generous as well as their tendency to distribute resources and engage in costly punishment . Such findings suggest that socio-economic and cultural context could determine much of the ways we tend to see and relate to material possessions: how we are inclined to share and distribute justice, how we think of who owns what and why?Ethnographies and comparative studies of property rights show how many norms of individual ownership may vary across cultures (Barclay, 2005;O'Meara, 1990). By the second year, children manifest explicit attachment to particular person (Ainsworth et al., 1978) and material things (Faigenbaum, 2005;, becoming vocal and explicit about their possession (Tomasello, 1998;Bates, 1990;Rochat, 2011). However, the frequency and form of infants' and toddlers' early attachment and exclusive control over things may vary across cultures. Early attachment to objects or transitional objects (Winnicott, 1953) is less prevalent in cultures where the practice is for children to sleep with their parents (Hobara, 2003). When asked to split valuable goods with someone else, preschoolers growing up in rural, traditional, or small communal living environments tend to be less selfish and more egalitarian In another rare cross-cultural study that compared one-to three-year-old toddlers growing up in different kibbutz, Lakin, Lakin, & Costanzo (1979) observe...

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Resumo: o objetivo do artigo é analisar o impacto do progresso das neurociências, em particular da descoberta dos neurônios-espelhos, sobre as teses referentes à moralidade. analisamos as tentativas atuais de naturalizar a moralidade baseadas nessa descoberta, a partir da qual se reduzem os princípios éticos a propriedades biológicas da natureza humana. Investigamos como os estudos em psicologia sobre a função da empatia, da capacidade de se colocar na perspectiva do outro e da simulação corporificada ganharam nova credibilidade, poder explicativo e, sobretudo, relevância teórica por causa da descoberta dos sistemas de neurônios-espelhos. Como parte desse movimento, observamos novas tentativas nas pesquisas atuais em estabelecer conexões funcionais e possivelmente causais entre o cérebro e o pensamento moral. Consideramos, numa perspectiva crítica, essas tentativas e a busca renovada pela formulação de uma ética naturalizada. Palavras-chave: neurônio espelho, empatia, ética, naturalismo, neuromoralidade.

Trata-se de investigar a noção de self agente em James e Winnicott. Em James, examinamos o elemento descritivo que constitui o self. Em Winnicott, exploramos a teoria explicativa sobre a emergência do self. A perspectiva de Winnicott é apresentada aqui como a pré-história do self jamesiano. A concepção de James é análoga ao self integrado winnicottiano, concebido como uma posição corporificada resultante da ação do organismo no campo experiencial. A combinação das duas abordagens resulta na noção de self como fluxo de identidade que emerge da interação com os outros no espaço transicional.