For generations, hunter-gatherers have served as mirrors held up to industrial civilization—reflecting back an idealized portrait of human nature defined by generosity, communal sharing, and natural egalitarianism. The Hadza of Tanzania, one of the last populations to subsist primarily by hunting and gathering, have been especially prominent in this narrative. But a new study published in PNAS Nexus suggests that the cooperative picture is considerably more complicated than the textbooks let on. When given the opportunity to take resources rather than simply donate them, Hadza participants revealed that equality tends to emerge not from altruism, but from self-interest.
The study, led by Duncan N.E. Stibbard-Hawkes of Baylor University and Kristopher M. Smith of Washington State University, used what researchers call a “give-or-take” game—a design deliberately crafted to better simulate the conditions under which food redistribution actually occurs in Hadza camps. Previous experiments have relied heavily on what behavioral economists call the “dictator game,” in which a participant receives an endowment and chooses how much, if any, to donate to another party. The Hadza, like other hunter-gatherer populations, have historically performed stingily in these tests, giving roughly 10% of their endowment on average—well below the 20% or more typically seen in industrialized societies. Yet by real-world measures, Hadza food sharing is remarkably equal: hunters regularly give away more than half their kill, with some estimates suggesting a hunter retains as little as 38% of large game.
That paradox is what Stibbard-Hawkes and his colleagues set out to resolve.
In their experiment, 117 Hadza participants from nine camps were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: advantageous inequality, in which they received more tokens than a campmate, or disadvantageous inequality, in which they received fewer. Crucially, participants could both give tokens to their campmate or take tokens from them, with each token representing a dried banana chip—a calorie-dense food that carries real value in a subsistence context. Campmates were identified by photograph, though the specific individual remained anonymous, giving the experiment a texture absent from purely abstract economic games.
The results were striking. Under conditions of advantageous inequality, only 40.9% of participants chose to give away any tokens, while 30% actually exacerbated the imbalance by taking more. When placed in the disadvantageous position, 58.8% chose to take—often far more than necessary to equalize the distribution. The most common single decision across both conditions was to take everything. Equality was rarely achieved as a goal unto itself: only 12.8% of participants left an even split of tokens.
“We find that equality was achieved only under conditions of disadvantageous inequality—suggesting that taking is more important in achieving redistributive equality than giving. This mirrors real life—if someone has too much, there’s often a lot of demanding shares from other people,” said Stibbard-Hawkes.
This finding aligns with what anthropologists call “demand sharing”—a concept developed by Nicholas Peterson in his influential 1993 paper on forager economies, in which redistribution is driven not by the generosity of producers but by the persistence of those who have less. James Woodburn, one of the leading ethnographers of the Hadza, observed that among hunter-gatherers shares are routinely asked for and even demanded—a dynamic that popular accounts have tended to paper over in favor of more flattering narratives.
The broader intellectual stakes here are significant. A prominent tradition in behavioral economics has argued that humans possess intrinsic, other-regarding fairness preferences—a drive to equalize outcomes even at personal cost. Ernst Fehr and colleagues have cited ethnographic evidence of hunter-gatherer food sharing as support for what they characterize as a strong egalitarian instinct in human evolutionary history. Popular science writers have gone further: historian Rutger Bregman, in his 2020 book Humankind, concluded from similar evidence that humans are essentially noble by nature. The new research does not dismiss altruism outright—a meaningful minority of participants did choose to give, even in the advantageous condition—but it challenges the premise that other-regarding equality preferences are the primary engine of redistributive equality.
According to Stibbard-Hawkes,“Though we saw a lot of generosity, the individual motivations underlying this equality were actually often quite self‑interested.”
The study also found notable variation by sex and age. Men and younger participants were significantly more likely to give resources when advantageously positioned and less likely to take when disadvantaged. The sex differences are consistent with a substantial body of work on hunter-gatherer labor patterns, which has found that men disproportionately favor widely shared food resources—a pattern linked to theories about reputational signaling and mate competition. Why younger participants were more prosocial remains less clear, though the researchers speculate it may reflect shifting generational attitudes toward generosity among a population undergoing rapid social change.
Perhaps most provocative is the study’s finding on cultural exposure. Participants who had greater contact with non-Hadza cultures—measured through knowledge of Swahili, visits to regional cities, formal schooling, and other proxies—were more tolerant of disadvantageous inequality. This runs counterintuitively against the common finding that market integration tends to increase pro-sociality in economic experiments. The researchers suggest a different mechanism may be at work: as traditional demand-sharing norms erode and notions of personal property take hold, individuals become more accepting of unequal outcomes. Settled Hadza villages, by direct field observation, show increasingly pronounced inequalities in stored wealth.
“Egalitarian societies exist—they’re not mythical. But if you actually look at the mechanics of how egalitarianism and relative political equality are maintained, it’s often people who are arguing, demanding shares and even insulting people who have too much,” concludes Stibbard-Hawkes.
The study is careful about its limitations. Economic games are not real life, and participants may behave differently under observation than in the flow of daily camp existence. The design does not capture third-party enforcement, reputational dynamics, or the cumulative social pressure that builds over time in tight-knit communities. Future work, the authors suggest, should attempt to directly link game behavior to real-world sharing decisions—a gap that remains largely unaddressed in the literature on forager societies. The influence of game “currency” and language on decision-making, which prior research has shown to be substantial among the Hadza, also warrants further exploration.
What the research offers, in the meantime, is a meaningful corrective. The Hadza do share, often generously. But the equality that results from that sharing appears to be sustained less by a deep-seated moral preference for fairness than by something more pragmatic: the recognition that if you don’t give, someone will come and take. The egalitarianism is real. The nobility of motive, it turns out, is more complicated.
Endnotes
1. Smith, K.M., Stibbard-Hawkes, D.N.E., Dimant, E., Mabulla, I.A., Bicchieri, C., and Apicella, C.L. (2026). “The ‘I’ in egalitarianism: Hadza hunter-gatherers averse to inequality primarily when personally unfavorable.” PNAS Nexus, 5(2), pgaf328. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf328
2. EurekAlert! press release: “Hunter-gatherer ‘egalitarianism’ is more complicated than we thought.” Baylor University, April 15, 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1126959
3. Marlowe, F.W. (2010). The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press, Los Angeles.
4. Wood, B.M. and Marlowe, F.W. (2013). Household and kin provisioning by Hadza men. Human Nature, 24(3), 280–317.
5. Peterson, N. (1993). Demand sharing: reciprocity and the pressure for generosity among foragers. American Anthropologist, 95(4), 860–874.
6. Woodburn, J. (1998). Sharing is not a form of exchange: an analysis of property-sharing in immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies. In C.M. Hann (Ed.), Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. Cambridge University Press.
7. Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., and Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young children. Nature, 454(7208), 1079–1083.
8. Marlowe, F.W. (2005). Dictators and ultimatums in an egalitarian society of hunter-gatherers: the Hadza of Tanzania. In J. Henrich et al. (Eds.), Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. Oxford University Press.
9. Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind: A Hopeful History. Bloomsbury Publishing.
10. List, J.A. (2007). On the interpretation of giving in dictator games. Journal of Political Economy, 115(3), 482–493.
11. Apicella, C.L., Azevedo, E.M., Christakis, N.A., and Fowler, J.H. (2014). Evolutionary origins of the endowment effect: evidence from hunter-gatherers. American Economic Review, 104(6), 1793–1805.
12. Stibbard-Hawkes, D.N.E., Smith, K.M., and Apicella, C.L. (2022). Why hunt? Why gather? Why share? Hadza assessments of foraging and food-sharing motive. Evolution and Human Behavior, 43(3), 257–272.
13. Stibbard-Hawkes, D.N.E. and von Rueden, C. (2025). Egalitarianism is not equality: moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Published online. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X25103932
14. Stibbard-Hawkes, D.N.E., et al. (2024). Foreign-language effects in cross-cultural behavioral research: evidence from the Tanzanian Hadza. PNAS Nexus, 3(6), pgae218.
COPY II (2-3 PARAGRAPHS)
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