Egalitarian behavior is considered to be a species-typical component of human cooperation. Human adults tend to share resources equally, even if they have the opportunity to keep a larger portion for themselves. Recent experiments have suggested that this tendency emerges fairly late in human ontogeny, not before 6 or 7 years of age. Here we show that 3-year-old children share mostly equally with a peer after they have worked together actively to obtain rewards in a collaboration task, even when those rewards could easily be monopolized. These findings contrast with previous findings from a similar experiment with chimpanzees, who tended to monopolize resources whenever they could. The potentially species-unique tendency of humans to share equally emerges early in ontogeny, perhaps originating in collaborative interactions among peers.
Much recent research has shown that the capacity for mental time travel and temporal reasoning emerges during the preschool years. Nothing is known so far, however, about young children's grasp of the normative dimension of future-directed thought and speech. The present study is the first to show that children from age 4 understand the normative outreach of such future-directed speech acts: subjects at time 1 witnessed a speaker make future-directed speech acts about/towards an actor A, either in imperative mode (“A, do X!”) or as a prediction (“the actor A will do X”). When at time 2 the actor A performed an action that did not match the content of the speech act at time 1, children identified the speaker as the source of a mistake in the prediction case, and the actor as the source of the mistake in the imperative case and leveled criticism accordingly. These findings add to our knowledge about the emergence and development of temporal cognition in revealing an early sensitivity to the normative aspects of future-orientation.
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