Free Just Babies by Paul Bloom

it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth.”
    W E DO seem to want to spread the wealth when it comes to other individuals. But I don’t think that the Robin Hood theory is right when we ourselves are involved. Instead, we seek relative advantage; we are motivated not by a desire for equality but by selfish concerns about our own wealth and status. This can be seen in the lifestyles of small-scale societies, in laboratory studies with Western adults, and, most of all, in the choices made by young children when they themselves have something to lose.
    Let’s look at societies first. For much of recorded history, we’ve lived in conditions of profound inequality.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells an unnerving story of what a truly nonegalitarian society looks like, from the Russia of the last century:
A district party conference was underway in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.”
For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause rising to an ovation” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.…
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.
That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed the Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”
    A more modern example comes from North Korea, where, in 2011, citizens were imprisoned after Kim Jong-il’s funeral for not mourning in a convincing enough fashion.
    Much of recorded history tells of societies led by Stalins, and this might reveal something about the nature of our psychology. Perhaps Homo sapiens is a hierarchical species, just like some of the great apes that we study. We are wired for dominance and submission—evolutionarily preparedto live in groups with a strong leader (an “alpha male” or “Big Man”) and everyone else below him. If so, then we would expect to see these social structures in contemporary small-scale societies, since, in important regards, they live as all of us lived about ten thousand years ago, before agriculture, the domestication of animals, and modern technology.
    In 1999,the anthropologist Christopher Boehm addressed this issue in Hierarchy in the Forest , which reviewed the lifestyles of dozens of small-scale human groups. Perhaps surprisingly, he found that they are egalitarian. Material inequality is kept to a minimum; goods are distributed to everyone. The old and sick are cared for. There are leaders, but their power is kept in check; and the social structure is flexible and nonhierarchical. It looks less like Stalin’s Russia and more like Occupy Wall Street.
    I don’t want to romanticize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle—I wouldn’t want to live in a world without novels and antibiotics. And they aren’t that nice to one another, anyway. They are egalitarian when it comes to relationships between adult males but hierarchical otherwise: parents dominate their