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Authors: Paul Bloom

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Young children don’t know everything.
Some experiments that I’ve done with the psychologists Koleen McCrink and Laurie Santos find that older children and adults think about relative generosity in terms of proportion—an individual with three items who gives away two is “nicer” than someone with ten items who gives away three—while young children focus only on absolute amount.
And other studies find that our understanding of the factors that can justify inequality—such as luck, effort, and skill—develops even through adolescence.

What we do see at all ages, though, is an overall bias toward equality. Children expect equality, prefer those who divide resources equally, and are strongly biased to divide resources equally themselves. This fits well with a certain picture of human nature, which is that we are born with some sort of fairness instinct:
we are natural-born
egalitarians. As the primatologist Frans de Waal puts it: “Robin Hood had it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth.”

W
E DO
seem to want to spread the wealth when it comes to other individuals. But I don’t think that the Robin Hood theory is right when we ourselves are involved. Instead, we seek relative advantage; we are motivated not by a desire for equality but by selfish concerns about our own wealth and status. This can be seen in the lifestyles of small-scale societies, in laboratory studies with Western adults, and, most of all, in the choices made by young children when they themselves have something to lose.

Let’s look at societies first. For much of recorded history, we’ve lived in conditions of profound inequality.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells an unnerving story of what a truly nonegalitarian society looks like, from the Russia of the last century:

A district party conference was underway in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.”
For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause rising to an ovation” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.…
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.
That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed the Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

A more modern example comes from North Korea, where, in 2011, citizens were imprisoned after Kim Jong-il’s funeral for not mourning in a convincing enough fashion.

Much of recorded history tells of societies led by Stalins, and this might reveal something about the nature of our psychology. Perhaps
Homo sapiens
is a hierarchical species, just like some of the great apes that we study. We are wired for dominance and submission—evolutionarily prepared
to live in groups with a strong leader (an “alpha male” or “Big Man”) and everyone else below him. If so, then we would expect to see these social structures in contemporary small-scale societies, since, in important regards, they live as all of us lived about ten thousand years ago, before agriculture, the domestication of animals, and modern technology.

In 1999,
the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue in
Hierarchy in the Forest
, which reviewed the lifestyles of dozens of small-scale human groups. Perhaps surprisingly, he found that they are egalitarian. Material inequality is kept to a minimum; goods are distributed to everyone. The old and sick are cared for. There are leaders, but their power is kept in check; and the social structure is flexible and nonhierarchical. It looks less like Stalin’s Russia and more like Occupy Wall Street.

I don’t want to romanticize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle—I wouldn’t want to live in a world without novels and antibiotics. And they aren’t
that
nice to one another, anyway. They are egalitarian when it comes to relationships between adult males but hierarchical otherwise: parents dominate their children and husbands control their wives. Also,
egalitarian
doesn’t mean
pacifist.
Hunter-gatherer societies are hyperviolent—there’s violence against women, violence between men competing for mates, and violence against rival groups. For these reasons, most people reading this book are better off than the average member of a contemporary hunter-gatherer tribe. Still, a very low-status person in a modern society—an elderly homeless man
living on the streets of Manhattan, say, or a teenage prostitute in São Paulo—might well be better off as a member of such a tribe, where at least there would be community, sustenance, and respect.

It looks so far that the anthropological evidence supports the Robin Hood theory, that humans are naturally imbued with some deeply ingrained preference for fairness and that this leads to equality in our “natural” social structures. But actually, Boehm argues the opposite. He observes that the egalitarian lifestyles of hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her. This is invisible-hand egalitarianism. Think about three children and a pie. One way that they can all get equal shares is if they all care about equality and agree that everyone should get the same. But the other way to get an equal division—the more human way, I think—is that each child is careful to ensure that he or she doesn’t get less than anyone else.

This strategy can work, in the pie example and the real world, only if individuals are able to defend their rights and protect their status. In the societies that Boehm describes, tribe members use criticism and ridicule to bring down those who they think are too big for their britches. As Natalie Angier put it: “Among the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari in Africa, a successful hunter who may be inclined to swagger is kept in check by his compatriots through a ritualized game called
‘insulting the meat.’ You asked us out
here to help you carry that pitiful carcass? What is it, some kind of rabbit?”

There is also behind-the-back gossip and open mockery. Boehm cites a scholar who writes:
“Among the Hadza … when a would-be ‘chief’ tried to persuade other Hadza to work for him, people openly made it clear that his efforts amused them.” (This was how graduate students treated me when I started as an assistant professor.)
And there are more serious penalties. Wannabe Stalins can be abandoned by their group, a fate that is akin to a death sentence. Or they can just be straight-out whacked. When a Baruya man tries to take his neighbors’ livestock and have sex with their wives, he is murdered. When a leader becomes “very quarrelsome and strong in magic,” his tribesmen respond by handing him over to a “vengeance party” from another tribe.

The egalitarian lifestyle of the hunter-gatherers, then, emerges from people jockeying for position, caring for themselves and those they love, and being willing to work together to protect themselves from being dominated. As Boehm puts it, “Individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition.… Because the united subordinates are constantly putting down the more assertive alpha types in their midst, egalitarianism is in effect
a bizarre type of political hierarchy: the weak combine forces to actively dominate the strong.”

Sadly, the sort of egalitarianism that Boehm describes has come to an end for most of us. Populations grew,
agriculture emerged, animals were domesticated, and new technologies were invented. Because of this, the available sanctions by the weak became less effective and the countermeasures by the powerful become deadlier. If we live in a small hunter-gatherer society, and an alpha male is asserting control, then we can laugh at him or ignore him. We can hold meetings, and if enough of us are unhappy, we can beat him up or kill him. But none of this works in societies where interactions are no longer face to face and where individuals or small groups of elites can accumulate grossly disproportionate resources, both material and social. An ambitious hunter-gatherer might have a gang of friends with rocks and spears; Stalin had an army and a secret police, gulags and rifles and thumbscrews. In the modern world, an ambitious and cruel leader driven by status hunger can form a group that dominates a population a thousand times larger. It is no longer so easy for the weak to gang up to dominate the strong (although some have argued that the Internet—being decentralized and somewhat anonymous—is helping to even the score).

L
ET

S
turn now to adults within our own society. Over the last few decades, researchers in the field of behavioral economics have designed clever and simple games to explore just how kind, fair, and egalitarian we really are.

The first of these is known as
the Ultimatum Game. The idea is simple. The participant walks into the lab and is randomly chosen to be either the “proposer” or the “recipient.” If she is chosen to be the proposer, she is given some sum of
money, say $10, and has the option of giving any fraction of this money to the recipient. The recipient, in turn, has just two options—to accept the offer or to reject it. Importantly, if the offer is rejected, neither person keeps any money, and the proposer is aware of this rule before she makes her offer. The experiment is typically conducted anonymously, as a one-shot game—the proposer and the recipient are in different rooms, don’t know who the other is, and will never encounter each other again.

Assuming that both participants are perfectly rational actors who care only about money, the proposer should give as little as possible. And the recipient should accept this offer, because $1 is better than nothing, and turning it down can’t lead to a better offer in the future, since the game is played only once. But this rarely happens. The proposer typically offers half or a little less than half of the amount.

This could conceivably reflect a Robin Hood impulse on the part of the proposer: a belief that an equal split is the right thing to do. But an obvious alternative is that proposers are acting out of self-interest, as they believe that miserly offers will be rejected. And they are right to believe this: in the lab, recipients do reject low offers, giving up a profit so that a stingy proposer gets nothing.

While turning down low offers is, in some sense, a mistake (the recipient walks away with nothing), the Ultimatum Game turns out to be one of those paradoxical situations in which it pays to be irrational, or at least to be thought of as irrational by others. If I were a selfish individual and knew that I was playing a one-shot Ultimatum
Game with an emotionless robot, then, as proposer, I would offer the minimum, because I would know it would be accepted. But if I was dealing with a normal person, I would worry that I would have a low offer rejected out of spite. And so I would hand over more money.

(
According to the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, when students in economics classes are put in the position of the proposer, they often offer the minimum, and this works out fine for them because they are playing with other economics students, who accept the minimum. It’s only when these rational proposers play with noneconomists that they are in for an unpleasant surprise.)

The recipient’s rejection of a low offer also makes sense when we realize that
our minds were not adapted for one-shot anonymous interactions. We evolved in a world in which we engaged in repeated interactions with a relatively small number of other individuals. So we are wired to respond to the lowball offer as if it were the first of many, even if we know, consciously, that it isn’t. The rejection, then, is a corrective “Screw you, buddy” that would make perfect sense if you were going to play the same person multiple times. And the psychological state that motivates this rejection is outrage toward the person making the offer.
You can see this in the recipients’ faces, which contort into looks of contempt or disgust,
and in their brains, where the areas associated with anger become more active.
In one study, where recipients were allowed to send anonymous messages to the proposers who lowballed them, typical messages included “Should not have been greedy. Oh well, you make
nothing”; “Dude, that’s kinda greedy”; “Thanks For Nothing”; and “You suck.”

What, precisely, is so annoying about being lowballed? The philosopher Shaun Nichols spells out the logic here: “If Jim is told to divide a good with Bill, and Jim elects to defy the [norm of equal division], giving Bill a tenth of the good, what is Jim’s justification? Since the good was a windfall, Jim can hardly claim that he earned the greater share. Given the presence of an equal-division norm, it will be natural to think that Jim is treating Bill as inferior.” Now, knowing this, Jim might refrain from making the low offer through the exercise of empathy—he might cringe at the thought of what it would feel like to be Bill, to be insulted in this manner, and this might motivate him to offer a fair division. But Jim might also refrain for a more selfish reason: If Bill is angry enough, he can retaliate and leave Jim with nothing.

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