Social evaluation of co-action partners: Children’s partner recruitment in cooperation and competition tasks

Abstract

Social evaluations are a pervasive feature of human thinking. Studies on selective trust, selective social learning, and helping – that is, in cooperative contexts – have shown that children become competent social decision-makers in their preschool years. Choosing partners based on relevant attributes is equally important for success in competitive situations, however. To test predictions from a dual-process account of children’s development of reasoning abilities, we devised two online experiments for 4- to 7-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were introduced to a weak and to a strong model and had the opportunity to apply this information strategically in competitive and cooperative domain-relevant games (requiring strength) and in a domain-irrelevant game (requiring object labelling knowledge). Children recruited the optimal partner in both contexts from around 5 years of age and generalized partner expertise to novel domains. Experiment 2 was designed to shed light on the reasoning process underlying partner recruitment choices. Children were introduced to a weak but smart and a strong but ignorant model and had the opportunity to apply this information in games of different domain-context combinations. Contrary to our expectations, even the oldest children performed poorly. Our findings are at odds with previous research showing that 4-year-olds rationally recruited optimal partners for cooperative tasks. Children may have struggled with the unfamiliar first-person perspective, and the difficulty of the task when they had to consider multiple agent characteristics at once.

Choose your partner: Social evaluation of skilfulness at cooperative co-action tasks in Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana)

“…Particularly, it is still an open question whether primates can infer future behaviour only for similar matching behaviours or whether they can make wider generalisations of a model's characteristics and resulting behaviours across contexts. From the human literature, we know about at least three inference types that play a role in social decision-making: behaviour matching, i.e., inferences based on the similarity of the past and current situations, global impression formation, i.e., making wider generalisation of a model's characteristics across contexts, and rational trait reasoning, i.e., rational trait-like inferences in context-specific ways [17,[38][39][40]. For nonhuman primates, it is difficult to disentangle whether they express social reasoning skills corresponding to either of these inferences or rather to associative learning strategies from their past interactions [41].…”