Fairness and distributive justice by 3- to 5-year-old Tibetan children

We asked whether young children raised in an environment strongly promoting compassion for others, as in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, would show less proclivity toward self-maximizing in sharing. We replicated the procedure of Rochat et al. with a group of 3- and 5-year-old Tibetan children living in exile and attending a traditional Buddhist school where the Dalai Lama resides. We report that Tibetan children, like children of seven other cultures, start from a marked self-maximizing propensity at 3 years of age, becoming significantly more fair by 5 years. These data confirm that the developing sense of equity by young children is comparable in the context of a compassion-based culture.