The game works like this: the puppet (with the aid of an adult puppeteer) and a three-year-old participant gather their hauls of little buckets. Then the child/puppet team is rewarded with stickers - one for each coin they have collected.
At this point the child has to decide how to share his or her prized stickers with their puppet partner.
This simple game revealed that, by the age of just three, children choose to reward their peers based on merit. The children gave the puppet more stickers if it had “worked harder” - gathering more coins.
This and other similar studies, Dr Shultz said, demonstrated that “co-operation and fairness are fundamental aspects of human behaviour”.
“[This study] also reframes social intelligence in terms of cooperation rather than deception,” she added. “I think that’s really nice.”
Deception has played a large part in the scientific study of fairness. While this experiment asked children to share the rewards with a partner after completing a shared task, many studies focus on whether humans, and other primates, choose to cheat a partner or to punish others for treating them unfairly.
A classic example of this type of test is known as the ultimatum game.
This is where one participant is tasked with making an offer to share something of value - for example, an amount of money - with a partner.
The partner then has the opportunity to either accept or reject this offer. And this is where the punishment comes in.
If the recipient decides to reject an apparently unfair offer, both participants receive nothing.