Children’s Weighing of Relative Certainty in Cooperative Tasks

• In Event: 1-088 - Children’s Early Ability to Reason in the Face of Uncertainty

Integrative Statement

Optimal cooperation on any task requires balancing the certainty with which we could achieve an outcome with the certainty that our partner could achieve it better. For example, as a novice rock climber you would likely prefer that the teacher at the gym ties your harness, while as an expert rock climber you would likely tie it yourself rather than gamble on the gym staff’s skill. Here, we explore how 4 – 9 year-old children weigh their own certainty in accomplishing a task to that of their partner. In particular, we ask at what age children begin strategically taking more difficult tasks for themselves when they believe their partner has worse chances of success than they do.
 
Across three studies (N = 330), we manipulated children’s own certainty by varying difficulty in a simple, perceptual number game (deciding whether there are more blue or yellow dots in an image), and varying a virtual partner’s certainty by manipulating their skill level (telling children that their partner was either better or worse than them at the game).
 
In Study 1 (N = 80), we first examined whether 4 – 7 year-old children can match skill to difficulty in third-party contexts. Children were introduced to two partners, one who was really good at the number game and one who was really bad, and were asked to divide pairs of questions that varied in difficulty in order to maximize the team’s success. We find that children as young as 5 succeed in this task, choosing to give the hard questions to the “good” partner and easy questions to the “bad” partner (F(3, 76) = 3.88, p = .012).
 
In Study 2 (N = 160), we extend this to a first-person task, introducing children to a single other partner who is either better or worse than them at the game. Children were then asked to divide pairs of questions between themselves and their partner. Contrary to Study 1, however, we find that children had a bias to keep the easier questions for themselves independent of their partner’s skill until around age 8 (F(3, 144) = 3.12, p = .028). In Study 3 (N = 190), we confirm that young children do not optimally divide questions even when the task is made substantially easier. Thus, despite being able to link skill and difficulty as young as age 5, children do not optimally weigh their partner’s certainty against their own until much later.
 
Together, these results suggest a developmental lag in how children reason about different sources of certainty in relation to cooperative task success: while 5-year-old children demonstrate an understanding of a strategy that maximizes success, it is not until several years later that their performance comparing their own certainty to a partner’s reflects that same strategy.

Authors

• Carolyn Baer, University of British Columbia
  Presenting Author

• Darko Odic, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author