Worth the wait: Children trade off delay and reward in self‐ and other‐benefiting decisions

Abstract

Human prosocial behaviors are supported by early-emerging psychological processes that detect and fulfill the needs of others. However, little is known about the mechanisms that enable children to deliver benefits to others at costs to the self, which requires weighing other-regarding and self-serving preferences. We used an intertemporal choice paradigm to systematically study and compare these behaviors in 5-year-old children. Our results show that other-benefiting and self-benefiting behavior share a common decision-making process that integrates delay and reward. Specifically, we found that children sought to minimize delay and maximize reward, and traded off delays against rewards, regardless of whether these rewards were for the children themselves or another child. However, we found that children were more willing to invest their time to benefit themselves than someone else. Together, these findings show that from childhood, other- and self-serving decisions are supported by a general mechanism that flexibly integrates information about the magnitude of rewards, and the opportunity costs of pursuing them. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/r8S0DGe7f8Q.

Leaving a Choice for Others: Children’s Evaluations of Considerate, Socially‐Mindful Actions

“…Second, recent work suggests that children reason about the expected rewards and costs of others’ actions and expect others to act in ways that maximize expected utilities (Jara‐Ettinger et al, 2016; Liu, Ullman, Tenenbaum, & Spelke, 2017). By late preschool years, children readily consider their own and others’ expected utilities in their own prosocial decisions (Bridgers et al, 2020; Liu, Gonzalez, & Warneken, 2019). For example, Bridgers et al (2020) shows that when children are asked to choose what to teach for a naïve learner, they consider the potential consequences of their decision to the learner’s utilities and choose to teach what would be more rewarding and more costly for the learner to learn.…”

Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends

“…The few studies investigating these skills in cooperative contexts have been focused primarily on children’s willingness to delay gratification in relation to generosity (e.g., the willingness to share resources or to invest effort on someone else’s behalf rather than for their own benefit; Liu, Gonzalez, & Warneken, 2019; Moore, Barresi, & Thompson, 1998; Thompson, Barresi, & Moore, 1997). However, no research to date has examined children’s delay-of-gratification skills in interdependent decision situations in which individuals have to not only continuously apply these skills but also trust their social partners to equally delay gratification to reach a joint cooperative goal.…”

Prospection and delay of gratification support the development of calculated reciprocity

“…Yet, several studies have established links between delay gratification and children's cooperative behaviors broadly construed. For instance, four-to-five-year-olds have been shown to delay gratification as part of for cooperative interactions by foregoing immediate rewards not only for their own but also other people's benefit (Liu et al, 2019;Gruen et al 2020). Five-tosix-year-olds are also more willing to delay rewards when they benefit together as a pair than when they benefit alone (Koomen et al, 2020).…”