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Percentage of Trials Assigning the Easier Question to Self in Experiment 1. Error bars represent 1 standard error.
Source publication
Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016–2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... p 2 = .06. As shown in Figure 2, a Tukey posthoc analysis revealed that only 9-year-olds matched skill and difficulty, keeping many more difficult trials for themselves in the Partner Worse condition than in the Partner Better condition, t(37) = 30.50, p < .001, ...
Context 2
... = 1.46. The conditions did not differ from one another in any other age group, though, as can be seen in Table 1 and Figure 2, 8-year-olds showed the same differentiation as the 9-year-olds but did not reach traditional levels of significance. ...
Context 3
... children generally allocated the easier question to themselves across both conditions. As shown in Table 1 and Figure 2, children at all ages took the easier question above chance of 50% when their partner was better, as expected given a strategy of matching skill with difficulty. However, when their partner was worse, 6-year-olds still took the easier question above chance -opposite the matching strategy -and 7-9-year-olds' selections did not differ from chance. ...
Citations
... In addition to domain knowledge, students may also consider what the speaker knows about their abilities (ability knowledge). People allocate their effort based on their abilities (Baer & Odic, 2022;Leonard et al., 2023;Magid et al., 2018;Metcalfe & Finn, 2013;Metcalfe & Kornell, 2005). For example, adults and children are more likely to stick with a challenge, when they are improving on a task versus plateauing Ten et al., 2021). ...
Students often receive encouragement but do not always find it motivating. Whose encouragement motivates students and what cognitive mechanisms underlie this process? We propose that students’ responses to positive feedback (e.g., encouragement) hinge on mental state representations, specifically what the speaker knows. Across three studies, we find that U.S. adolescents (n = 581–759 11- to 19-year-olds per study, preregistered; >80% racial/ethnic minorities; >36% low income) report being more motivated by, more confident in, and more likely to seek out encouragement from hypothetical and real-world speakers (e.g., parents, teachers, peers) who are knowledgeable about both their abilities (e.g., students’ math skills) and the task at hand (e.g., math). To make feedback most effective, our findings suggest that students should seek and receive encouragement from those who know them and their activities well.
... Recent work suggests that even young children use social information to decide how to allocate effort to a task; for example, young children might observe others to infer the difficulty of a task (Lucca et al., 2020) or use their example to determine whether expending effort will pay off Leonard et al. (2017Leonard et al. ( , 2020. Children are also capable of dividing physical and cognitive labor into collaborative tasks based on relative ability and task difficulty (Magid et al., 2018;Baer & Odic, 2022). More recent models have enriched theories of psychological reasoning by demonstrating that people do not merely expect others to fulfill desires-thus solely maximizing rewards-but rather expect others to act as utility maximizers-balancing the rewards of an outcome against the costs of achieving it Jara-Ettinger et al. (2016). ...
By collaborating with others, humans can pool their limited knowledge, skills, and resources to achieve goals that outstrip the abilities of any one person. What cognitive capacities make human collaboration possible? Here, we propose that collaboration is grounded in an intuitive understanding of how others think and of what they can do-in other words, of their mental states and competence. We present a belief-desire-competence framework that formalizes this proposal by extending existing models of commonsense psychological reasoning. Our framework predicts that agents recursively reason how much effort they and their partner will allocate to a task, based on the rewards at stake and on their own and their collaborator's competence. Across three experiments (N = 249), we show that the belief-desire-competence framework captures human judgments in a variety of contexts that are critical to collaboration, including predicting whether a joint activity will succeed (Experiment 1), selecting incentives for collaborators (Experiment 2), and choosing which individuals to recruit for a collaborative task (Experiment 3). Our work provides a theoretical framework for understanding how commonsense psychological reasoning contributes to collaborative achievements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... Collaboration motivates children to take on harder tasks (Butler & Walton, 2013). By 4-5 years old, they are able to reason about differences in knowledge and appropriately divide up roles according to skill levels (Magid, DePascale, & Schulz, 2018), although full competence may emerge later in other (nonphysical) task domains (Baer & Odic, 2022). Further exploration of developmental trajectories associated with each element of the CARMI framework may help to elucidate the specific cognitive mechanisms upon which effective collaboration is built. ...
Humans routinely form groups to achieve goals that no individual can accomplish alone. Group coordination often brings to mind synchrony and alignment, where all individuals do the same thing (e.g., driving on the right side of the road, marching in lockstep, or playing musical instruments on a regular beat). Yet, effective coordination also typically involves differentiation, where specialized roles emerge for different members (e.g., prep stations in a kitchen or positions on an athletic team). Role specialization poses a challenge for computational models of group coordination, which have largely focused on achieving synchrony. Here, we present the CARMI framework, which characterizes role specialization processes in terms of five core features that we hope will help guide future model development: Communication, Adaptation to feedback, Repulsion, Multi-level planning, and Intention modeling. Although there are many paths to role formation, we suggest that roles emerge when each agent in a group dynamically allocates their behavior toward a shared goal to complement what they expect others to do. In other words, coordination concerns beliefs (who will do what) rather than simple actions. We describe three related experimental paradigms-"Group Binary Search," "Battles of the Exes," and "Find the Unicorn"-that we have used to study differentiation processes in the lab, each emphasizing different aspects of the CARMI framework.
Choosing adequate partners is essential for cooperation, but how children calibrate their partner choice to specific social challenges is unknown. In two experiments, 4‐ to 7‐year‐olds ( N = 189, 49% girls, mostly White, data collection: 03.2021–09.2022) were presented with partners in possession of different positive qualities. Children then recruited partners for hypothetical tasks that differed with respect to the quality necessary for success. Children and the selected partner either worked together toward a common goal or competed against each other. From age 5, children selectively chose individuals in possession of task‐relevant qualities as cooperative partners while avoiding them as competitors. Younger children chose partners indiscriminately. Children thus learn to strategically adjust their partner choice depending on context‐specific task demands and different social goals.
Despite the importance of persistence in early learning, we know little about how children reason about outcomes that result from their efforts. Here we examined the role of effort type (i.e., physical vs. cognitive) and intensity (i.e., high vs. low effort) in shaping children's decision making about effort‐based rewards. Five‐ to 7‐year‐olds ( N = 133) were assigned to one of four conditions (High Physical Effort, Low Physical Effort, High Cognitive Effort, Low Cognitive Effort) and completed a series of tasks to construct a toy. Tasks varied in the type (physical/cognitive) and intensity (high/low) of effort required to complete them. After constructing their toy, children completed a series of tasks to probe how much they valued that toy. Across conditions, children preferred their toy and gave it a higher monetary value, relative to a stranger's. However, when choosing their toy came at a cost, children no longer preferred it. Only children who built their toy through either cognitive or low effort were willing to incur a cost for their toy. Older children, across conditions, were also more likely to incur a cost for their toy. These findings demonstrate that by age five, children are sensitive to variations in effort type and intensity, and these factors shape how they evaluate effort‐based rewards.
Across four studies (total N = 431), we examined 5- to 10-year-old children's choices to censor depictions of harm. In all studies, children learned about (fictional) movies that depicted harmful behaviors and decided whether specific audiences should be allowed to watch those movies. In Study 1, children often censored depictions of harms and did so similarly when considering both themselves and another hypothetical child as the viewer. At the same time, children did not censor indiscriminately: Children censored depictions of intentional harms more than accidental harms and, in Study 2, children (and adults; N = 101) censored harms (especially intentional ones) more from younger versus older audiences. In Studies 3 and 4, we more directly tested children's motivations for censoring harms, examining dual potential motivations of 1) preventing viewers from feeling sad; and 2) preventing viewers from being inspired to engage in harmful behaviors. We found that children who were motivated to avoid inspiring harmful behaviors were especially likely to censor depictions of harmful intentions. Together, our results indicate that children make sophisticated decisions regarding censorship and underscore an early emerging motivation to disrupt cascades of harmful behavior. These findings hold implications for children's thinking about the psychological and behavioral consequences of harm and for children's thinking about the potential effects of media on themselves and others.
Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review developmental evidence that this metacognitive strategy does not require reportable processing. Uncertainty prompts nonverbal human infants and nonhuman animals to engage in strategies like seeking help, searching for additional information, or opting out. Certainty directs children’s attention and active learning strategies and provides a common metric for comparing and integrating conflicting beliefs across people. We conclude that certainty is a continuous, domain-general signal of belief quality even early in life.