Interesting science article in Reuters today, excerpted below. (Full story here).
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Robin Hood lives!
People taking part in a game designed to explore egalitarian impulses in human nature consistently robbed from players assigned the most money while giving money to those with the least, scientists said on Wednesday.
James Fowler, a University of California at San Diego political scientist, and his fellow researchers detected what they saw as a "Robin Hood impulse" in people who took part in the experiment, described in the journal Nature. "That's the classic story we all know, where someone's taking from the rich and giving to the poor, which is exactly what we're seeing in this experiment," Fowler said in a reference to the medieval English folk legend.
"In essence, what we found is that our taste for equality is one of the important reasons why we cooperate with each other, much more so than, say, other species of primates," Fowler said in a telephone interview.
The experiment was carried out last year using 120 paid student volunteers at a computer lab on the campus of the University of California at Davis.
The volunteers sat at computer terminals, and a computer would assign them into groups of four. Once placed into a group, each person was assigned an amount of money and was told how much money the other three members were given ....
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