Poster #24 - Does Shifting Perspective Optimize Young Children’s Future-Oriented Decision-Making?

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Although preschoolers are often biased by their current desires when making future-oriented decisions, in certain contexts, they reason more optimally for another person. For example, while a 3-year-old may predict that they will prefer juice and sticker books over coffee and magazines in adulthood, when asked to predict what another same-age peer will “like best when he/she is all grown up,” they more often select the prototypical adult items (e.g. "Preferences" task, Bélanger et al., 2014). This “other-over-self” advantage may occur because reasoning for another provides “psychological distance” (i.e., increased divergence from the self on dimensions of time, space or social distance), thus reducing children’s tendency to be biased by their current states (Lee & Atance, 2016; Prencipe & Zelazo, 2005). This led us to wonder whether other “distancing” techniques also confer an advantage. In two experiments, we explored: (1) whether adopting the perspective of a peer first improves preschoolers’ subsequent future-oriented decisions for the self, and (2) whether pretending to be a same-age peer confers a similar advantage as choosing for them. For both experiments, participants completed the Preferences and Delay of Gratification (e.g., 1 sticker now vs 4 stickers later) tasks as measures of future thinking. In Experiment 1, 158 preschoolers were asked to either first adopt the perspective of a peer (e.g., “What will Sally like best when she’s all grown up?”) before making future-oriented decisions for themselves (i.e., “What will you like best…”), or vice versa (i.e., children answered for the self then for a peer). We predicted that answering for a peer first would boost performance for self because it would prime a more psychologically distanced perspective. Although our results did not support this hypothesis, we detected an other-over-self advantage in the Delay of Gratification task (p = .025), wherein preschoolers performed better in the peer condition (M = 3.67, SD = 1.40) than in the self condition (M = 3.18, SD = 1.59), consistent with findings from previous studies. In Experiment 2, 66 3- to 5-year-olds (projected N = 98) made decisions either for themselves, a same-age peer, or while pretending to be a same-age peer. Interestingly, while preschoolers made significantly more optimal future-oriented decisions when choosing for a same-age peer (M = 0.89, SD = 0.06) than when choosing for the self (M = 0.59, SD = 0.08, p =.03), performance when pretending to be a peer (M = 0.68, SD = 0.08) fell somewhere in between (see Figure 1). Together, these findings suggest that choosing for a same-age peer leads to the most optimal future-oriented decisions and may thus confer the most “psychological distance.” Moreover, while pretending to be a same-age peer (Experiment 2) may – pending further data collection – provide some benefit to preschoolers’ future-oriented reasoning, choosing for a same-age peer prior to choosing for self (Experiment 1) does not appear to have such an effect.

Authors

• Sydney Rossiter, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Gladys Ayson, University of Ottawa

• Elena Gallitto

• Caitlin E V Mahy

• Cristina Atance, University of Ottawa