The “I” in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable

Many economists contend that humans have strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, many hunter-gatherers have endemic food-sharing and proscriptions against accumulation. These "egalitarian" practices appear superficially consistent with intrinsic equality preferences. Previous experiments, involving donating positive endowments to strangers, seldom match the redistributive equality observed in real-world sharing. Such methods ignore the role of taking, and do not capture sharing dynamics among differentially wealthy campmates. This study, instead, uses a one-player "give-or-take" experiment, with real campmates as recipients, better emulating real-world forager food redistribution. We asked 117 Hadza participants, privately, to redistribute food resources between themselves and a campmate after receiving advantageous and disadvantageous endowments. Although few participants were wholly self-interested, most did not seek general equality. Instead, most tolerated inequality when it benefited them but not when it benefited others. Given advantageous endowments, a minority (40.9%) chose to give, while 30% exacerbated inequality by taking more. Given disadvantageous endowments, many took more than necessary to achieve equality. The modal decision across tasks was to take everything. Only when participants could take from others did results approximate real-world sharing patterns. Findings suggest that intrinsic, private other-regarding fairness preferences need not underlie widespread forager food-sharing, which could be maintained by others' self-motivated demands or extrinsic fairness norms. We also found that men and younger people were more willing to give away advantageous endowments. Further, we found that individuals with greater exposure to cultures outside Hadzaland were more accepting of unfavorable inequality, suggesting that marketization might promote disadvantageous inequality tolerance.