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People taking part in a game designed to explore egalitarian impulses in human nature consistently robbed from players assigned the most money while giving money to those with the least, scientists said on Wednesday.

James Fowler, a University of California at San Diego political scientist, and his fellow researchers detected what they saw as a “Robin Hood impulse” in people who took part in the experiment, described in the journal Nature.

“That’s the classic story we all know, where someone’s taking from the rich and giving to the poor, which is exactly what we’re seeing in this experiment,” Fowler said in a reference to the medieval English folk legend.