childrens hands coming together

The emergence of cooperation

Boston College researchers examine how fairness, trustworthiness, honesty, and forgiveness develop in children across diverse populations

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  in the journal Science Advances.

The team from Associate Professor of Psychology Katherine McAuliffe’s 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—namely, 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—fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and honesty—in 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. 

Katherine McAuliffe

Associate Professor Katherine McAuliffe

“Cooperation is crucial to the success of our species,” said McAuliffe. “We were interested in how behaviors related to cooperation—fairness, trustworthiness, honesty, and forgiveness—emerge 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.”

The norms themselves contained cross-cultural differences. For instance, adults across cultures have different ideas of what constitutes “fair” behavior.

“There are cross-cultural regularities in some aspects of the development of cooperation—namely, 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,” said co-author Dorsa Amir, a former post-doctoral researcher in McAuliffe’s lab and now an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

“We find cross-cultural differences in the norms themselves,” Amir said. For instance, adults across cultures have different ideas of what constitutes ‘fair’ 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.”

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.  

A child completing an activity for a study

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’s behaviors and norms tend to converge toward community-specific norms in middle childhood. 

The team also identified three cooperative strategies—maximization, generic cooperation, and partner-contingent cooperation—that 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’s sharing and fairness behavior across societies to understand a broader suite of cooperative behaviors.

“By including a ‘cooperative task battery’ we were in a good position to explore how cooperative behaviors relate to one another,” 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.

“Our lab has done a lot of work on punishment behavior, finding punishment to be a common response to transgressions across societies,” she said. “Yet, here, both adults and children seemed to endorse forgiveness over punishment. It’s possible that, in past work, we have overestimated how much people want punishment because we haven’t given them alternative options such as forgiveness.”

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. 

“Specifically, we are comparing the influence of adult and peer models in influencing children’s fairness and trustworthiness behavior,” she said. “This 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.”

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