We asked whether young children raised in an environment strongly promoting compassion for others, as in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, would show less proclivity towards self-maximizing in sharing. We replicated the procedure of Rochat et al. (2009) with a group of three-and fiveyear-old Tibetan children living in exile and attending a traditional Buddhist school where the Dalai Lama resides. We report that Tibetan children, like children of seven other cultures start from a marked self-maximizing propensity at three years of age, becoming significantly more fair by five years. These data confirm that the developing sense of equity by young children is comparable in the context of a compassion-based culture.
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