Interdependence Facilitates Children’s Delayed Gratification in a Joint Marshmallow Task

• In Event: 1-091 - A Cross-Cultural Exploration of the Role of Interdependence in Children’s Cooperative Motivations

Integrative Statement

Cooperation is a central characteristic of human social life. However, cooperation is risky by definition: by entering cooperative endeavors individuals make themselves dependent on the cooperative contributions of others which may or may not occur. For such endeavors to succeed, individuals must therefore be willing to invest in cooperation while trusting that others will invest too. Theories suggest that social interdependence generates cooperative motivations that help mitigate these risks (e.g., Tomasello et al., 2012) and investigations with young children have provided first support (as evidenced, for instance, by preschoolers’ increased tendency to share resources after interdependent collaboration, Hamann et al., 2011). However, it is currently unclear whether interdependence also elicits the motivation to invest effort - a key requirement of overcoming the challenges of risky cooperation - and moreover, whether this effect is found across cultures.
To investigate this issue, the current study used a modified version of the famous marshmallow task on delayed gratification as a measure of psychological investment (Mischel et al., 1972). Participants were 5- and 6-year-old children from a midsized German city and from the Kikuyu cultural group in Kenya (N = 206). Same-sex dyads were randomly allocated to the interdependent or the independent condition. In the independent condition, children each faced a standard marshmallow task in separate rooms: they were given one cookie and received a second one only if they did not eat it until the experimenter came back. The interdependent condition was identical except that children’s outcomes were linked: Children received a second cookie only if they both waited but not if either of them ate their cookie before the experimenter came back.
The interdependence hypothesis predicts that children will invest more effort (and thus eat less often) in the interdependence condition due to the social motivations this context creates. Rational choice models, by contrast, predict the opposite: since the expected returns of each child’s investment are diminished in the interdependence condition they should be more likely to eat.
Children were less likely to eat or taste the cookie in the interdependent than in the independent condition (GLMM, 𝜒2=6.98, df=1, p=0.008) lending support to the interdependence hypothesis. Kikuyu children ate or tasted less often than German children (GLMM, 𝜒2=4.43, df=1, p=0.035) but there was no interaction between condition and culture. In a follow-up test (dependent condition) children were told that if they waited, they and their partner would both receive a second cookie (i.e., their partner depended on them but not vice versa). The results were intermediate between but neither significantly different from the independent nor the interdependent condition (see Fig. 1) suggesting that our initial finding cannot entirely be explained by children’s motivation to benefit their partner.
These findings provide cross-cultural support for the conjecture that interdependence generates the motivation to invest effort in cooperation and that this motivation is present already early in development. They further correspond to theories on the origins of commitment positing that a partner’s perceived effort facilitates investment in cooperative endeavors (Székely & Michael, 2018).

Authors

• Sebastian Grueneisen, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Koomen, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  Non-Presenting Author

• Esther Herrmann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
  Non-Presenting Author