Mini managers: Children strategically divide cognitive labor among collaborators, but with a self‐serving bias

Abstract

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016-2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self-serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third-party collaborative task did 5-year-olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self-serving bias.

Learning with certainty in childhood

“…the questions) when rewards were provided for correct responses [45,87]. Children by 4 to 5 years old also integrate certainty with early social understanding by assigning high certainty items to collaborators with less skill and offering to help others faced with difficult tasks [88,89]. Theories of achievement motivation also presuppose that children differentiate easy from difficult items, preferring easy items when driven to demonstrate competence and preferring challenging items when driven to build new skills [90].…”

The Emergence of Specialized Roles Within Groups

“…Collaboration motivates children to take on harder tasks (Butler & Walton, 2013). By 4–5 years old, they are able to reason about differences in knowledge and appropriately divide up roles according to skill levels (Magid, DePascale, & Schulz, 2018), although full competence may emerge later in other (nonphysical) task domains (Baer & Odic, 2022). Further exploration of developmental trajectories associated with each element of the CARMI framework may help to elucidate the specific cognitive mechanisms upon which effective collaboration is built.…”

The role of effort type and intensity in children's decisions about effort‐based outcomes

“…This interpretation is in line with previous research showing developmental differences in children's reasoning about effort and effort-based rewards. Between five and seven years, children become better able to strategically divide effort to complete difficult tasks (Baer & Odic, 2022) and show more abstract reasoning about the products of their efforts (e.g., by reappraising unattractive rewards after expending effort to obtain them; Benozio & Diesendruck, 2015). During this developmental time frame, children also undergo rapid changes and advances in executive function capabilities (Raghunathan et al, 2022;Zelazo & Carlson, 2012), which may provide them with advanced cognitive mechanisms and strategies that support the ability to delay gratification, raising the possibility that advances in executive function skills The findings from the current study pave the way for several additional exciting areas of research.…”

“…Though we did not have specific predictions about how children's reasoning about products of their efforts would differ across early childhood, past work has shown that between the ages of five and seven, children undergo key transitions in their reasoning about effort. Between five and seven, children become increasingly able to make strategic decisions about dividing effortful labor (Baer & Odic, 2022), and become more adult‐like in their reasoning about the value of others' efforts (i.e., by valuing intellectual ideas over physical labor; Li et al, 2013). During this same time, children also undergo changes in executive functioning abilities, which may provide children with more advanced cognitive mechanisms and strategies to make judgements about products of their effort and delay gratification (Raghunathan et al, 2022; Zelazo & Carlson, 2012).…”