Four- and 5-Year-Olds Infer Differences in Relative Ability and Appropriately Allocate Roles to Achieve Cooperative, Competitive, and Prosocial Goals
Name
opmi_a_00019.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.43 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a87b95f12995e07bb9249cd6b13da8bd
Author(s)
Magid, Rachel W
DePascale, Mary
Schulz, Laura E
Date Issued
2018
Journal
Open Mind
Publisher
MIT Press - Journals
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Preschoolers are sensitive to differences in individuals’ access to external resources (e.g., tools) in division of labor tasks. However, little is known about whether children consider differences in individuals’ internal resources (e.g., abilities) and whether children can flexibly allocate roles across different goal contexts. Critically, factors that are relevant to role allocation in collaborative contexts may be irrelevant in competitive and prosocial ones. In three preregistered experiments, we found that 4- and 5-year-olds (mean: 54 months; range: 42–66 months; N = 132) used age differences to infer relative ability and appropriately allocate the harder and easier of two tasks in a dyadic cooperative interaction (Experiment 1), and appropriately ignored relative ability in competitive (Experiment 2) and prosocial (Experiment 3) contexts, instead assigning others the harder and easier roles, respectively. Thus, 3-and-a-half- to 5-year-olds evaluate their own abilities relative to others and effectively allocate roles to achieve diverse goals.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/OPMI_A_00019
