ArticleNature communications2021
A veil of ignorance can promote fairness in a mammal society.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Normative assembly rule reveals fairness in microbial communities.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Coordination of network heterogeneity and individual preferences promotes collective fairness.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Inbreeding does not reduce major histocompatibility complex diversity in the banded mongoose.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Sex-Dependent Influence of Major Histocompatibility Complex Diversity on Fitness in a Social Mammal.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Cooperative breeding and the selection for information sharing among groupmates.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- The neurobiology of parenting and infant-evoked aggression.Physiological reviews · 2025Review
- Caregiver's cognitive traits are associated with pup fitness in a cooperatively breeding mammal.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The social formation of fitness: lifetime consequences of prenatal nutrition and postnatal care in a wild mammal population.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Toward an evolutionary ecology of (in)equality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Mechanisms of equality and inequality in mammalian societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cryptic kin discrimination during communal lactation in mice favours cooperation between relatives.Communications biology · 2023Article
- The ecology of wealth inequality in animal societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Rawls argued that fairness in human societies can be achieved if decisions about the distribution of societal rewards are made from behind a veil of ignorance, which obscures the personal gains that result. Whether ignorance promotes fairness in animal societies, that is, the distribution of resources to reduce inequality, is unknown. Here we show experimentally that cooperatively breeding banded mongooses, acting from behind a veil of ignorance over kinship, allocate postnatal care in a way that reduces inequality among offspring, in the manner predicted by a Rawlsian model of cooperation. In this society synchronized reproduction leaves adults in a group ignorant of the individual parentage of their communal young. We provisioned half of the mothers in each mongoose group during pregnancy, leaving the other half as matched controls, thus increasing inequality among mothers and increasing the amount of variation in offspring birth weight in communal litters. After birth, fed mothers provided extra care to the offspring of unfed mothers, not their own young, which levelled up initial size inequalities among the offspring and equalized their survival to adulthood. Our findings suggest that a classic idea of moral philosophy also applies to the evolution of cooperation in biological systems.
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