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Young children are notoriously bad at sharing, but their sense of fairness may be culturally determined. Children from Western cultures are more likely to reject an offer that unfairly benefits them than kids from other countries, according to Nature journal.

Previous research on Western children found that 4-year-olds will sacrifice a material reward, as well as that of another child, if they think that they have received less – possibly out of spite. But as they get older, they will also turn down a reward to prevent another child from losing out.

To find out if this is true more generally, Peter Blake at Boston University and Katherine McAuliffe at Yale University and their colleagues played an inequality game with 866 pairs of children from Canada, India, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, Uganda and the US. In each game two children were allocated different numbers of treats, with one asked to decide whether to accept or reject the amount on behalf of both.

Children from all cultures rejected receiving less themselves – although the age from which they started doing so varied from 4 to 6 in the US and Canada, to 10 in Mexico. This could suggest this form of fairness is universal, say Blake.

Indeed, separate research has indicated that certain primates, domestic dogs and corvids such as crows and ravens possess a similar sense of fairness.

However, only children from the US, Canada and Uganda rejected an allocation that was more favourable to themselves. In these kids, this behaviour appeared between the ages of 10 and 12. “It doesn’t mean that children in the other locations don’t have a sense of fairness, but this kind of fairness behaviour seems more likely to be shaped by culture,” Blake says.

One possibility, the researchers suggest, is that the more market-driven a society is, the more people are exposed to ideas of equality. “That may sound counter-intuitive, but when you think about going to a marketplace you are trying to engage in a transaction that balances the scales,” says Blake.

Alternatively, children who grow up in non-Western societies may develop a different sense of fairness because they are exposed to less inequality in their everyday lives, Blake suggests; an idea which he now hopes to investigate further.

In this sense, Uganda is an anomaly. Blake wonders if it can be accounted for by the fact that the schools the children were drawn from contained some Western teachers, who might have shaped their cultural preferences. Further experiments are needed to test this, though.

“Their results are at least consistent with the pattern that we see across non-human species,” says Sarah Brosnan at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who studies the evolution of decision-making and fairness in non-human primates. She believes that the more universal sense of fairness is a mechanism by which individuals can learn something about the value of their social partners – such as whether or not they are cheats.