Does friendship matter? Sharing, fairness and parochial altruism in African children and adolescents

Abstract

In this paper we present data on the altruistic behavior among rural Meru and urban mixed-ethnic children of Dar-es-Salaam of Tanzania, based on their decision-making in three sets of sharing games. Particularly, we examine the readiness of rural and urban African schoolchildren to take prosocial, sharing and fairness de-cisions; we also reveal to what extent these decisions are congru-ent towards friends and anonymous peers and test the gender differences in the decision-making. Our results provide another con-firmation of the parochial altruism hypothesis.