Conforming to coordinate: Children use majority information for peer coordination

Abstract

Humans are constantly required to coordinate their behaviour with others. As this often relies on everyone's convergence on the same strategy (e.g., driving on the left side of the road), a common solution is to conform to majority behaviour. In this study, we presented 5-year-old children with a coordination problem: To retrieve some rewards, they had to choose the same of four options as a peer partner--in reality a stooge--whose decision they were unable to see. Before making a choice, they watched a video showing how other children from their partner's peer group had behaved; a majority chose the same option and a minority chose a different one. In a control condition, children watched the same video but could then retrieve the reward irrespective of their partner's choice (i.e., no coordination was necessary). Children followed the majority more often when coordination was required. Moreover, conformers mostly justified their choices by referring to the majority from the video demonstration. This study is the first to show that young children are able to strategically coordinate decisions with peers by conforming to the majority.

Communicative eye contact signals a commitment to cooperate for young children

“…Therefore, here we add a new type of information that children can use to solve the knowledge problem in coordination problems. Previous studies have shown that 5-year-old children are able to solve different coordination problems by using salience (Grüeneisen, Communicative eye contact signals a commitment 32 Wyman, & Tomasello, 2015a), majority information (Grüeneisen, Wyman, & Tomasello, 2015b), and their partners' cultural knowledge (Goldvicht-Bacon & Diesendruck, 2016). Study 1 extends these findings by focusing on interpersonal signals that children can use in solving coordination problems.…”

Children coordinate in a recurrent social dilemma by taking turns and along dominance asymmetries.

“…Indeed, a striking aspect of coordination in humans is that people often manage to jointly agree on a solution even without communicating (Mehta, Starmer, & Sugden, 1994; Schelling, 1960). Recent studies have shown that some of these abilities are already present in late preschoolers (Goldvicht-Bacon & Diesendruck, 2016; Grueneisen et al, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). However, whether children can also coordinate without communication when facing conflicts—for example, when having to tacitly agree on a division of resources—would be an interesting question for future research.…”

How fairness and dominance guide young children’s bargaining decisions

“…Previous work has shown that already at age 5 children show first competencies at coordinating decisions even in one‐shot interactions in which they cannot communicate. For example, they can coordinate on solutions they jointly perceive to stick out, either because the solution is perceptually salient (Grueneisen et al, 2015a), others have coordinated on the solution previously (Berger et al, 2021; Grueneisen et al, 2015b), or because the solution can be presumed to be known by members of their cultural community (Goldvicht‐Bacon & Diesendruck, 2016). To achieve this, children often make fairly sophisticated inferences about their interaction partner's perceptual states or beliefs and align their own decisions accordingly (Grueneisen et al, 2015c; Siposova et al, 2018).…”