Many residential mobile hunter-gatherers like the Hadza of Tanzania are notable for their widespread “egalitarian” food redistribution, and flat political hierarchies. Even by the most conservative estimates, approximately 50% of the meat that Hadza hunters bring back to camp flows to other households. These political and redistributive norms have led many popular authors to paint an ‘Edenic’ picture of small-scale societies as atypically noble and generous. Our findings contradict this narrative. Using incentivised economic games, we show that people in egalitarian societies are often tolerant of inequality – as long as it benefits them. Instead, “equal” outcome distributions, which mirrored real life, were only observed when people were given the opportunity to ‘take’ from peers, rather than to give. Drawing on a broad ethnographic literature review, we further show that many mechanisms structuring equal outcomes in small-scale societies are driven not exclusively by altruism but, paradoxically, often by individual self-interest.