Tag Archives: sharing

Warneken: Young children share the spoils after collaboration

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Warneken, F., Lohse, K., Melis, A. P., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Young children share the spoils after collaboration. Psychological Science, 22(2), 267–73. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610395392

Interesting paper.

1) The authors postulate that the relationship between joint collaboration and sharing is crucial for understanding the origins of equality, both in ontogeny and phylogeny. Therefore, they investigate how children actively divide rewards after working for them in a collaborative problem-solving task.

Most studies on sharing involve windfall situations, in which resources are given to the children by a third party, with no work or effort involved. Moreover, many studies use a forced-choice paradigm with predefined allocation options, which does not allow for an assessment of how children themselves would actively negotiate over how to distribute resources with another person.

In contrast, Warneken et al.’s research is guided by the notion that people often have to work toward obtaining resources, and that they distribute those resources actively, rather than choosing individually between predefined options. Previous studies, they say, have not shown how children share resources in situations that might be the cradle of equality: actual joint collaborative activities with a social partner.

2) The experiment closely resembles sharing experiments with chimpanzees and other non-human primates. Warneken et al test children in dyads. Children have to perform a task together: they have to pull from both ends of a rope at the same time in order to bring a box close to them. In this way, they are able to get a reward (such as stickers or candy that have been placed in the box). In one condition, the box has two holes far apart, so that each child can get her reward without interference from the other participant. In a second (“clumped”) condition, the box has only one hole, and therefore only one child can access the rewards at a time.

3) Warneken et al. found that neither the reward type nor the opportunity to monopolize rewards in the clumped condition interfered with the children’s collaboration. 3 year-olds collaborate successfully in situations in which resources can be monopolized. The collaborative abilities of young children, compared with those of chimpanzees, are not constrained to the same extent by a tendency to monopolize resources.

Children predominately produced equal shares. They shared rewards equally most of the time, even when rewards could be monopolized more easily (clumped condition). At an age when children are just beginning to skillfully collaborate with peers, they already engage in sharing behavior that results in equitable outcomes.

4) What does it all mean? Competition over resources, the authors claim, is mitigated in human children (when compared with chimpanzees and other primates) by an emerging sense of equal sharing of the spoils, which enables successful collaboration even early in ontogeny. Thus, the authors claim that this study supports a Tomasello-like evolutionary hypothesis, according to which the emergence of cooperation is due not only to cognitive and behavioral skills, but also to a reduction in competition over resources. Competition over resources is mitigated in human children by an emerging sense of equal sharing of the spoils, which enables successful collaboration even early in ontogeny.

5) According to this study, children are capable of equitable distributions a very early age. Although many studies place the origins of equality at around 5, 6 or even 7 years of age, it all depends on how the concrete distribution problem is presented to the children. Warneken et al. present children with a collaborative, non-competitive situation. In addition, in this study the peer is present; the dyad works together in a problem solving activity (compare this with economic games that are played by a single present individual and an absent, anonymous, “invisible”). Even more, some of the dyads comprise children who know each other well, since they attend the same day-care center (they are not one-shot interactions, as in most economic games). All this seems to help even 3 year-olds to produce equitable outcomes early in development. The authors reach the conclusion that, perhaps, children learn to acknowledge each other’s right to gain equal resources in situations in which they collaborate to produce a mutually beneficial outcome that one person acting alone would not be able to achieve (this result is not proven by the experiment, in my opinion).

Kanngiesser on children’s application of the merit principle

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Text #9

Kanngiesser, P., & Warneken, F. (2012). Young Children Consider Merit when Sharing Resources with Others. PLoS ONE, 7(8).

This is a great paper. It tackles the classic problem of merit as a principle of fairness (or of distributive justice): rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task.

Kanngiesser and Warneken did two studies about children’s application of the merit principle. They made children play against a puppet at a game of collecting (“fishing”) coins that were later exchanged for rewards. They varied the work-contribution of both partners by manipulating how many coins each partner collected. Three- and five-year-olds kept, on average, significantly more stickers for themselves in the more-work condition than in the less-work condition. Children, in other words, kept fewer stickers in trials in which they had contributed less than in trials in which they had contributed more than the partner, showing that they took merit into account. Therefore, it seems that three- and five year- old children already use merit to share resources with others, even when sharing is costly for the child.

Although this appears to show that children take merit into account to calibrate their responses, it should also be noted that children almost never give away more than half of the stickers when the partner had worked more. “Even though children were clearly able to consider different work contributions, this tendency was constrained by a self-serving bias.” Thus, merit-based sharing is also mixed with or calibrated by the egotistic, self-serving bias documented by Rochat and many others.

The paper also presents a similar, second study, that shows that children’s sharing behavior is not just determined by their own absolute work-effort. Rather, children appear to take into account their own and their partner’s relative contributions when allocating resources. (Therefore, there  is some kind of elemental proportional or relational thinking here). “Young children can use comparisons between work-contribution to allocate resources.”

Warneken & Tomasello – Emergence of contingent reciprocity in young children

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Paper #7

Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2013). The emergence of contingent reciprocity in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 116(2), 338–350.

This is another crucial study by Tomasello and his team. The researchers designed games to be played individually by the toddlers participating in the study. The child and the researcher would play in parallel, side by side. At some point the child would need more resources to continue playing and these would have to be provided by the researcher; later the researcher would lack resources and the child would have the opportunity to either help the researcher or defect. As the authors put it: “we gave 2- and 3-year-old children the opportunity to either help or share with a partner after that partner either had or had not previously helped or shared with the children. Previous helping did not influence children’s helping. In contrast, previous sharing by the partner led to greater sharing in 3-year-olds but not in 2-year-olds.”

These results do not support theories claiming either that reciprocity is fundamental to the origins of children’s prosocial behavior or that it is irrelevant. Instead, they support an account in which children’s prosocial behavior emerges spontaneously but is later mediated by reciprocity.

It is not until 3.5 years of age that children modulate their sharing contingent on the partner’s antecedent behavior. Children first develop prosocial tendencies (already present in babies or young toddlers) and later those tendencies become mediated by reciprocal strategies. Helping and sharing emerge before children begin to worry about direct reciprocity. Later in development, they seem to become more sensitive to reciprocity, adjusting their prosocial behavior accordingly.