Expectations of Mutual Benefit Facilitate Children’s Coordination in a Conflict of Interest

• In Event: 3-210 - Game Theory in the Playground: The Development of Cooperative Problem-Solving in Children

Integrative Statement

Humans routinely coordinate their actions to achieve outcomes they could not achieve individually. In both adults and young children, this is aided by the ability to form mutual expectations based on information shared with others in common knowledge (Schelling, 1960; Lewis, 1969; Grueneisen et al., 2015).
However, people also frequently coordinate when they have divergent interests (e.g., two business associates each looking for a good deal or individuals dividing the spoils of joint collaborative efforts). Theories suggest that this is supported by social motivations elicited by social interdependence. Specifically, interdependence is thought to generate joint expectations for mutual benefit which facilitates the attainment of synergistic compromises (e.g., Sugden, 2011). Previous developmental work has shown that children are able to reach compromises in conflicts of interest by around age five (Grueneisen & Tomasello, 2017; Melis et al., 2016). It is currently unclear, however, if and from what age children’s coordination efforts are based on joint expectations for mutual benefit.
To address this issue, five- and seven-year-old children (N = 160) were allocated into same-age and same-sex dyads and presented with a coordination problem comprising a conflict of interest. Each child chose between three payoff divisions, one of which favored one child while another favored the other child (each providing three rewards to the favored child and only one to the disfavored child). The third division presented a fair compromise providing two rewards to each child (Fig. 1). Children chose sequentially and could not communicate with one other or see what their partner had chosen. In the coordination condition, children knew that their outcomes were interdependently linked: they would only be rewarded if they both chose the same reward distribution but not if they chose different ones. In the individual condition, children could independently choose a distribution, thus providing an indication of children’s baseline preference for the three distributions. Our dependent measure was whether or not children chose the fair distribution.
The results showed that five-year-olds did not distinguish between conditions and mostly chose the distribution favorable to them, even though this resulted in high levels of coordination failure in the coordination condition. Seven-year-olds, by contrast, chose the fair distribution significantly more often in the coordination condition than in the individual condition (age-condition interaction, GLMM, 𝜒2=9.23, df=1, p=0.002, Fig. 2). A follow-up study revealed that seven-year-olds did not choose the fair distribution because it required each child to compromise to the same degree or due to its surface-level features (e.g., its symmetry) but because it was the distribution that provided the highest mutual benefit.
These findings indicate that by age seven (but not age five) children jointly assume interactions marked by social interdependence to be mutually beneficial. They further show that fair compromises do not necessarily require strong other-regarding preferences and support the conjecture that fairness may have its origins in the context of social interdependence (e.g., Tomasello et al., 2012).

Authors

• Sebastian Grueneisen, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Michael Tomasello, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author