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 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.

Young children consider the expected utility of others’ learning to decide what to teach

“…These results suggest that utility-based reasoning may play an important role in curating cultural knowledge by supporting selective transmission of high-utility information.DECIDING WHAT TO TEACH 3 Humans actively explore their surroundings and learn from their own experience. 1 Even young children direct their own learning through exploratory play and update their 2 beliefs from self-generated evidence 1,2,3,4 . However, exploration involves uncertainty; 3 learners may not know the time and e ort required to make a discovery, and even after 4 much trial-and-error, they may fail to discover anything at all.…”

Young children consider the expected utility of others’ learning to decide what to teach

“…Complementing prior work that focused on the actual process of teaching a given concept, we presented a computational-level account 41 that characterises how human teachers decide which concepts or what knowledge to teach, and empirically tested its predictions with young children. Our account is grounded in the theoretical proposal that humans expect other agents to act in ways that maximise their utilities 8,13,14 and recent empirical work on early-developing abilities to reason about the utilities of others' goal-directed actions 31,32,34 Additionally, children considered the learner's costs of exploration selectively when deciding what to teach but not when deciding what to play with (Experiment 2) even when they had not personally incurred these costs (Experiment 3). Since even adults often fall victim to a "curse of knowledge" both in everyday reasoning 42,43 and teaching 44 , it is impressive that children chose to teach what would be more costly to learn from a naïve learner's perspective even though it was no longer costly for them (i.e., both toys were easy to activate once learned).…”

“…Yet a hallmark of helpful, e ective teaching is its potential to make learning less costly from the learner's perspective; a tendency to minimise the overall cost of generating information could emerge solely from the teacher's motivation to minimise their own costs rather than a regard for the learner. Given that even infants and young children expect others to act in ways that maximise their expected utilities 30,31,32,33,34 , an important open question is whether children can actively choose to maximise others' utilities. Consistent with this possibility, one study reports that children prioritise teaching what was taught by an adult (over what children discovered on their own) when the taught information is causally opaque and thus di cult to discover 35 .…”

Deciding What to Do: Developments in Children’s Spontaneous Monitoring of Cognitive Demands

“…When choosing between toys that required different combinations of buttons to activate, 5‐ to 7‐year olds reliably chose to play with toys that had fewer buttons, inferring that toys with more buttons were more difficult to play (Bridgers, Jara‐Ettinger, & Gweon, 2020). When choosing between sitting at one of two tables that varied in sticker rewards and the wait time needed to earn the stickers, 5‐year olds integrated described delay costs and rewards when deciding, choosing the table with longer wait times only if the number of stickers was sufficiently higher than at the other table (Liu, Gonzalez, & Warneken, 2019).…”