与其他灵长类动物的社会相比，人类社会的一个显著特征是，在很多情况下社会成员之间可以平等分享资源。然而，儿童和黑猩猩在有意外收获时分享资源都不是很公平。
在一项有关对意外收获的反应的行为研究中，研究人员让儿童得到玩具，让黑猩猩得到食物。研究结果显示了一个倾向：对于小至3岁的儿童，如果他们的意外收获是通过一个团队成员共同努力赢得的话，那么他们会比较公平地去分享。
这个发现与人们的普遍假设是矛盾的：平均主义的倾向是在上学年龄、即6-7岁的时候出现的，儿童在这个年龄开始学习关于平等的社会准则。而黑猩猩则不喜欢平等，不管意外收获是否是通过合作得到的。
现代人类希望在大集体中平等分配资源的倾向，其根源可能在于共同努力之后对战利品的分享。
生物探索推荐英文论文摘要：
Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees
Humans actively share resources with one another to a much greater degree than do other great apes, and much human sharing is governed by social norms of fairness and equity. When in receipt of a windfall of resources, human children begin showing tendencies towards equitable distribution with others at five to seven years of age. Arguably, however, the primordial situation for human sharing of resources is that which follows cooperative activities such as collaborative foraging, when several individuals must share the spoils of their joint efforts. Here we show that children of around three years of age share with others much more equitably in collaborative activities than they do in either windfall or parallel-work situations. By contrast, one of humans’ two nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), ‘share’ (make food available to another individual) just as often whether they have collaborated with them or not. This species difference raises the possibility that humans’ tendency to distribute resources equitably may have its evolutionary roots in the sharing of spoils after collaborative efforts.
