Children’s inequity aversion depends on culture: A cross-cultural comparison

• Children in the US and South Africa rather throw a resource away than to distribute it unequally.
• In the present study, Ugandan children could distribute an uneven number of resource equally or throw one item away.
• In contrast to their US peers, the majority of the Ugandan children rather distributed resources equally.
• This suggests intercultural differences in children’s fairness-related decision making.

Recent work showed the presence of strong forms of inequity aversion in young children. When presented with an uneven number of items, children would rather tend to throw one item away than to distribute them unequally between two anonymous others. The current study examined whether or not this pattern is a universal part of typical development by investigating 6- and 7-year-old Ugandan children. Results revealed that the Ugandan children, in contrast to their U.S. peers, tended to distribute the resources unequally rather than to throw the remaining resource away. This points to cross-cultural differences in the development of children’s fairness-related decision making.