The emergence of cooperation
Children across the globe engage in a constellation of behaviors that support cooperation, an action critical to the survival of the human species, a team of Boston College researchers 聽in the journal Science Advances.
The team from Associate Professor of Psychology Katherine McAuliffe鈥檚 Cooperation Lab surveyed children in the urban United States, rural Uganda, Canada, and Peru, and the hunter-horticulturalist indigenous Shuar of Ecuador.
The researchers found there are cross-cultural regularities in some aspects of the development of cooperation鈥攏amely, that younger children tend to be self-interested, and that as children get older their behavior starts to reflect local norms, according to the report.
The researchers examined the development of four cooperative behaviors鈥攆airness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty鈥攊n more than 400 children aged 5 to 13 from five societies. They also collected normative judgments from more than 160 peers and nearly 90 adults from each community.聽
Associate Professor Katherine McAuliffe
鈥淐ooperation is crucial to the success of our species,鈥� said McAuliffe. 鈥淲e were interested in how behaviors related to cooperation鈥攆airness, trustworthiness, honesty, and forgiveness鈥攅merge with age across diverse populations. We found some similarities, such as fairness and trustworthiness behaviors aligning with adult norms over age across societies. And we found some differences, such as variations in the norms themselves.鈥�
The norms themselves contained cross-cultural differences. For instance, adults across cultures have different ideas of what constitutes 鈥渇air鈥� behavior.
鈥淭here are cross-cultural regularities in some aspects of the development of cooperation鈥攏amely, that younger children tend to be self-interested, and that as children get older their behavior starts to reflect the norms of their broader society,鈥� said co-author Dorsa Amir, a former post-doctoral researcher in McAuliffe鈥檚 lab and now an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.
鈥淲e find cross-cultural differences in the norms themselves,鈥� Amir said. For instance, adults across cultures have different ideas of what constitutes 鈥榝air鈥� behavior. Our study shows that children seem to be sensitive to those specific differences and tend to bring their behavior in line with them over time.鈥�
The team worked with 5- to 13-year-old children and adults in Canada, Ecuador, Peru, Uganda, and the U.S. They designed four different child-friendly activities to measure fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty. For example, in the fairness activity, children used an intuitive wooden apparatus to make decisions about whether to accept or reject uneven divisions of candies between themselves and a peer.聽聽
The team worked with 5- to 13-year-old children and adults in Canada, Ecuador, Peru, Uganda, and the U.S.
The research found substantial variation in cooperative behaviors and norms across populations, but, more generally, that children鈥檚 behaviors and norms tend to converge toward community-specific norms in middle childhood.聽
The team also identified three cooperative strategies鈥攎aximization, generic cooperation, and partner-contingent cooperation鈥攖hat become more prevalent with age and differ across societies. All told, the findings show how the differences and similarities present as cooperative behavior develops within and across cultures.
McAuliffe said the study, undertaken with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, built on previous work that had looked at children鈥檚 sharing and fairness behavior across societies to understand a broader suite of cooperative behaviors.
鈥淏y including a 鈥榗ooperative task battery鈥� we were in a good position to explore how cooperative behaviors relate to one another,鈥� said McAuliffe, referring to the collection of activities and tasks they administered during their sessions with participants in the study.
McAuliffe said the researchers were most surprised by the findings about the role of forgiveness.
鈥淥ur lab has done a lot of work on punishment behavior, finding punishment to be a common response to transgressions across societies,鈥� she said. 鈥淵et, here, both adults and children seemed to endorse forgiveness over punishment. It鈥檚 possible that, in past work, we have overestimated how much people want punishment because we haven鈥檛 given them alternative options such as forgiveness.鈥�
McAuliffe and her team are working on a follow-up report from four of these same countries that looks at the mechanisms of norm transmission.聽
鈥淪pecifically, we are comparing the influence of adult and peer models in influencing children鈥檚 fairness and trustworthiness behavior,鈥� she said. 鈥淭his is an important extension of the current work because it goes beyond showing that children vary in their cooperative behavior and looks at how that variation may come about.鈥�