This is less of an indictment of human nature than it is an indictment of a system that would continuously force people to make choices like this.

Also, doesn’t this experiment presume something like a hierarchy of control over rewards? In other words, it presumes that resources are always in the hands of someone else and that they should be distributed based on one’s behavior. I wonder how this one would have played out if the children — and the children alone — were given control over the graham crackers to distribute amongst one another. I suspect the results would be vastly different.