Just rewards
A Harvard University study built around an innovative economic game indicates that, at least for our younger selves, the desire for equity often trumps the urge to maximize rewards. “We were able to show that 8-year-olds have a general sense of fairness and are willing to make large sacrifices to enforce it with other children,” said Peter Blake, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics who co-authored the study with Katherine McAuliffe, a doctoral student at the University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. “Children younger than 8 are more self-interested, yet they’re still willing to deny themselves rewards in order to prevent a transaction that’s unfair to them.” The study, which was conducted under the auspices of Harvard’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies and appears in the August 2011 issue of the journal Cognition, explores a fundamental principle of economics, namely that humans do all they can — within the bounds...