We appreciate Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden’s timely clarification of “egalitarianism” and how it has been applied (and misapplied) to the study of hunter-gatherers. The authors provide compelling evidence that hunter-gatherer societies are marked by inherent inequalities between individuals and that egalitarianism emerges from processes that allow most individuals to acquire capital. Here, we extend this argument by agreeing that egalitarianism does not exclusively emerge among hunter-gatherers – it also emerges with regularity among children and their peer cultures across diverse societies. Drawing from the developmental literature, we contend that these processes are driven not only by self-interest alone but also by a disposition to treat others’ interests as equally deserving of consideration. Taken together, these patterns suggest that egalitarian preferences are not entirely a result of external features such as subsistence practices but likely also stem from early-emerging biases in human social cognition.

Ethnographic and archaeological evidence suggests that children spend a majority of their time in peer groups (Konner, Reference Konner2017; Lew-Levy & Amir, Reference Lew-Levy and Amir2024; Lew-Levy et al., Reference Lew-Levy, Reckin, Lavi, Cristóbal-Azkarate and Ellis-Davies2017) and have likely done so for most of human history (Nowell, Reference Nowell2021). Just as in hunter-gatherer societies, mixed-age peer groups are fundamentally unequal, with variation in embodied, social, and material capital, as well as leadership, gender, age, and knowledge. Importantly, these features are not limited to children of hunter-gatherer societies; they emerge among children of disparate cultures (Lew-Levy & Amir, Reference Lew-Levy and Amir2024), even in post-industrialized societies such as the United Kingdom (Opie & Opie, Reference Opie and Opie2000) and East Asian societies characterized by high institutional control (Kong & Ding, Reference Kong and Dingin press).

Despite these inherent inequities, children’s behaviors and preferences also reflect many of the “egalitarian processes” described in the target article. There is growing evidence that children participate in status leveling through norm enforcement strategies, such as protest, tattling, and gossip (Yucel & Vaish, Reference Yucel and Vaish2018), and by protesting the unequal distribution of material goods (Hamann et al., Reference Hamann, Warneken, Greenberg and Tomasello2011; Warneken et al., Reference Warneken, Lohse, Melis and Tomasello2011). These protests dovetail with demand-sharing, another process observed among children. While research in this domain is still growing, ethnographic evidence suggests that demand-sharing can even become ritualized, as in the case of xibùdim among Israeli children, with complex norms governing resource distributions between peers (Katriel, Reference Katriel1987). Similarly, children exhibit a preference for consensus-based collective decision-making. In peer groups, children engage in a constant process of negotiating and constructing rules which they use to manage their social interactions (Cobb-Moore, Danby, & Farrell, Reference Cobb-Moore, Danby and Farrell2009). They are also more likely to accept unfavorable group decisions when their own voice is considered (Grocke, Rossano, & Tomasello, Reference Grocke, Rossano and Tomasello2018) and prefer to make decisions by majority rule, rather than letting a single individual decide (Hok et al., Reference Hok, Gerdin, Zhao and Shaw2025). Lastly, while children do not often have the residential mobility of adult hunter-gatherers, they do have social mobility: their peer groups exhibit fission–fusion dynamics, with individuals moving between social partners and adjacent groups (Lew-Levy et al., 2017; Lew-Levy et al., Reference Lew-Levy, Lavi, Reckin, Cristóbal-Azkarate and Ellis-Davies2018). Thus, many of the “egalitarian processes” detailed by Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden are also observed with regularity among children and their peer groups across diverse cultures.

Yet, the empirical study of equality in both hunter-gatherers and children has focused primarily on outcomes. Children do indeed care about the equality of outcomes, especially in resource distribution settings (e.g., Blake et al. Reference Blake, McAuliffe, Corbit, Callaghan, Barry, Bowie, Kleutsch, Kramer, Ross, Vongsachang, Wrangham and Warneken2015; Amir et al. Reference Amir, Ahl, Jordan, Bolotin, Bogese, González, Callaghan, Sugiyama, Otali, Tusiime, Bangayan, Snodgrass and McAuliffe2026). Young children, for instance, often protest and reject unequal outcomes, particularly when they are disadvantaged (Dunham, Durkin, & Tyler, Reference Dunham, Durkin and Tyler2018; Hamann et al., Reference Hamann, Warneken, Greenberg and Tomasello2011; Huppert et al. Reference Huppert, Cowell, Cheng, Contreras-Ibáñez, Gomez-Sicard, Gonzalez, Huepe, Ibanez, Lee, Mahasneh, Malcolm-Smith, Salas, Selcuk, Tungodden, Wong, Zhou and Decety2018; Li et al. Reference Li, Wang, Yu and Zhu2016; McAuliffe et al., Reference Mcauliffe, Blake, Steinbeis and Warneken2017; Warneken et al., Reference Warneken, Lohse, Melis and Tomasello2011). But as in the hunter-gatherer literature, an outsized focus on outcomes overlooks a key insight: children’s evaluations of outcomes are not divorced from the processes that produce them. This sensitivity to process emerges early and deepens with age. By 4 years of age, children show a higher regard for procedural justice, where the distribution process is seen as fair (e.g., when resources are divided by a random spinner), over distributive justice, where the outcomes are distributed equally (Grocke, Rossano, & Tomasello, Reference Grocke, Rossano and Tomasello2015; Shaw & Olson, Reference Shaw and Olson2014; Qiu et al., Reference Qiu, Yu, Li, Cheng and Zhu2017). Relatedly, children strongly prefer impartial over partial procedures, with third-party considerations of procedural justice emerging early, followed by first-party considerations (even at the expense of one’s individual payoff) in middle childhood (Dunham et al., Reference Dunham, Durkin and Tyler2018). This preference even remains when one’s partner is absent (Grocke et al., Reference Grocke, Rossano and Tomasello2015). Thus, children’s partiality toward procedural justice is early emerging and robust.

To understand what motivates children’s fairness preferences, we must look beyond outcomes to the processes and values that underlie them. A recent account argues that children interpret both outcomes and processes through the lens of “equal respect” – the recognition of others as equally deserving individuals whose interests merit the same consideration as one’s own – which some have argued underlies children’s preference for procedural over distributive justice (Engelmann & Tomasello, Reference Engelmann and Tomasello2019). This perspective bears striking similarity to Boehm’s assertion from the target article: egalitarian societies are “not intent on true and absolute equality, but on a kind of mutual respect that leaves individual autonomy intact” (Reference Boehm1999). Ethnographic evidence further supports this claim; in the aforementioned case of xibùdim, for example, children’s explanations suggest that respect motivates their demand-sharing: “It’s not that I will die if I don’t get a bite of the popsicle… but it is simply … respect” (Katriel, Reference Katriel1987). In fact, the term xibùdim comes from the verb lexabed, meaning “to respect.” Thus, a preference for “egalitarian processes” may reflect a concern for equal respect, in addition to self-interest.

In sum, we contend that children’s preferences and behaviors among peers closely resemble those of “egalitarian” hunter-gatherer societies, both in their inherent inequalities and the processes by which those inequities are managed. This disposition emerges with regularity across diverse cultural contexts, even among children with no exposure to hunter-gatherer lifeways. This consistency suggests that egalitarian motivations are not reducible to particular social structures and ecologies but also reflect foundational values in human social cognition, among them a concern for equal respect.