Patricia Kanngiesser

University of Plymouth | UoP · School of Psychology

Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a ba...

Many societal challenges are threshold dilemmas requiring people to cooperate to reach a threshold before group benefits can be reaped. Yet receiving feedback about others’ outcomes relative to one’s own ( relative feedback) can undermine cooperation by focusing group members’ attention on outperforming each other. We investigated the impact of rel...

Cross-cultural studies are crucial for investigating the cultural variability and universality of cognitive developmental processes. However, cross-cultural assessment tools in cognition across languages and communities are limited. This paper describes a gaze following task designed to measure basic social cognition across individuals, ages, and c...

Dishonest behaviors such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex-ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as useful interventions to counteract dishonest behavior, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including...

Theoretical accounts assume that key features of human social cognition are universal. Here we focus on gaze-following, the bedrock of social interactions and coordinated activities, to test this claim. In this comprehensive cross-cultural study spanning five continents and 17 distinct cultural communities, we examined the development of gaze-follo...

Sharing of resources is a common feature of human societies. Yet, there is substantial societal variation in children’s generosity, and this variation emerges during middle childhood. Societal differences in self-construal orientation may be one factor influencing the ontogeny of generosity. Here, we examine anonymous Dictator Game sharing in 7-and...

Humans and many other animal species act in ways that benefit others. Such prosocial behaviour has been studied extensively across a range of disciplines over the last decades, but findings to date have led to conflicting conclusions about prosociality across and even within species. Here, we present a conceptual framework to study the proximate re...

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across fi...

Can Boyer's model of ownership psychology provide useful insights for comparative research? I apply his model to argue that we currently have evidence for possession psychology (based on competitive resource acquisition) in non-human primates, but not for ownership psychology.

Cheating is harmful to others and society at large. Promises have been shown to increase honesty in children, but their effectiveness has not been compared between different cultural contexts. In a study (2019) with 7- to 12-year-olds (N = 406, 48% female, middle-class), voluntary promises reduced cheating in Indian, but not in German children. Chi...

Introduction Refugee youth are often faced with the compounding challenges of heightened exposure to traumatic events and acculturating to a new country during a developmental period when their sense of self is still forming. This study investigated whether refugee youth’s acculturation orientation (separation, integration, marginalization, and ass...

Promises are voluntary commitments to perform a future action and are often thought to be powerful levers for behavioral change. Here we studied the effectiveness of promises in two preregistered, incentivized field experiments with German students (N = 406) on the premises of a cafeteria. In Experiment 1, the majority of participants (63%) kept th...

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (AgeRange = 3.5-4.5 years; N = 144; 76♀) mind ascriptions and social cogni...

There is extensive research on children’s intergroup attitudes, but their perceptions of refugee children have rarely been studied. We conducted a study with 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 60) in Germany following the arrival of unprecedented large numbers of refugees in 2015 and 2016. Children completed a set of three tasks that measured their pe...

Children all over the world learn language, yet, the contexts in which they do so varies substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their two-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime acro...

Humans, unlike any other species, have adapted to diverse environments across the globe due to cultural knowledge, skills, and practices. In early childhood, parent–child interactions play a pivotal role in cultural learning, but controversies about what constitutes teaching have stymied the systematic assessment of variation and similarities in pa...

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated chi...

This paper provides a roadmap for engaging in cross-cultural, developmental research in practical, ethical, and community-engaged ways. To cultivate the flexibility necessary for conducting cross-cultural research, we structure our roadmap as a series of questions that each research program might consider prior to embarking on cross-cultural examin...

Creating objects can increase our evaluation of them, even when we compare them to physically identical copies (IKEA effect). Here we evaluate the influence of collaboration on the IKEA effect in two societies-the United Kingdom and India. One hundred twenty-eight 5-to-6-year-old children (48% female, 50% British middle class, 50% Indian middle cla...

During pandemics, effective nonpharmaceutical interventions encourage people to adjust their behavior in fast-changing environments in which exponential dynamics aggravate the conflict between the individual benefits of risk-taking and its social costs. Policy-makers need to know which interventions are most likely to promote socially advantageous...

Significance Humans, as compared with other animals, create and follow conventional norms that determine how we greet each other, dress, or play certain games. Conventional norms are universal in all human societies, but it is an open question whether individuals in all societies also actively enforce conventional norms when others in their group b...

Refugee youth constitute around a third of the refugee population in Germany. We studied the experiences of newly arrived Syrian and Iraqi refugee youth, aged 14 to 18 years ( N = 20), in Germany. We utilized semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to investigate (a) the main challenges faced by youth and (b) their main coping resources to...

There are sometimes legitimate reasons for breaking a promise when circumstances change. We investigated 3- and 5-year-old German children’s understanding of promise breaking in prosocial (helping someone else) and selfish (playing with someone else) conditions. In Study 1 (n = 80, 50% girls), preschoolers initially kept their own promise in all co...

There are sometimes legitimate reasons for breaking a promise when circumstances change. We investigated 3- and 5-year-old German children’s understanding of promise breaking in prosocial (helping someone else) and selfish (playing with someone else) conditions. In Study 1 (n = 80, 50% girls), preschoolers initially kept their own promise in all co...

This paper provides a roadmap for engaging in cross-cultural, developmental research in practical, ethical and community-engaged ways. To cultivate the flexibility necessary for conducting cross-cultural research, we structure our roadmap as a series of questions that each research program might consider prior to embarking on cross-cultural examina...

People frequently engage in dishonest behavior at a cost to others, and it is therefore beneficial to study interventions promoting honest behavior. We implemented a novel intervention that gave participants a choice to promise to be truthful or not to promise. To measure cheating behavior, we developed a novel variant of the mind game—the dice‐box...

From early on, human infants acquire novel actions through observation and imitation. Yet, the neural mechanisms that underlie infants’ action learning are not well understood. Here, we combine the assessment of infants’ neural processes during the observation of novel actions on objects (i.e. transitive actions) and their subsequent imitation of t...

Human cooperation is probably supported by our tendency to punish selfishness in others. Social norms play an important role in motivating third-party punishment (TPP), and also in explaining societal differences in prosocial behaviour. However, there has been little work directly linking social norms to the development of TPP across societies. In...

Recent studies have proposed that social norms play a key role in motivating human cooperation and in explaining the unique scale and cultural diversity of our prosociality. However, there have been few studies that directly link social norms to the form, development and variation in prosocial behaviour across societies. In a cross-cultural study o...

Social learning strategies are key for making adaptive decisions, but their ontogeny remains poorly understood. We investigate how social information use depends on its source (adults vs. peer), and how it is shaped by household composition (extended vs. nuclear), a factor known to modulate social development. Using a simple estimation task, we sho...

Social learning strategies are key for making adaptive decisions, but their ontogeny remains poorly understood. The authors investigate how social information use depends on its source (adults vs. peer), and how it is shaped by adolescents’ household composition (extended vs. nuclear), a factor known to modulate social development. Using a simple e...

Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children participate...

Most humans share to some degree. Yet, from middle childhood, sharing behavior varies substantially across societies. Here, for the first time, we explored the effect of self-construal manipulation on sharing decisions in 7- and 8-year-old children from two distinct societies: urban India and urban United Kingdom. Children participated in one of th...

Promises are crucial for human cooperation because they allow people to enter into voluntary commitments about future behavior. Here we present a novel, fully incentivized paradigm to measure voluntary and costly promise-keeping in the absence of external sanctions. We found across three studies ( N = 4,453) that the majority of participants (61%–9...

In three experiments, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-olds (N = 240) consider ownership when taking resources for themselves and allocating resources to another agent. When selecting resources for themselves, children generally avoided taking resources that belonged to another agent and instead favored their own resources (Experiments 1 and 2...

In three experiments, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-olds (N = 240) consider ownership when taking resources for themselves and allocating resources to another agent. When selecting resources for themselves, children generally avoided taking resources that belonged to another agent and instead favored their own resources (Experiments 1 and 2...

In three experiments, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-olds (N = 240) consider ownership when taking resources for themselves and allocating resources to another agent. When selecting resources for themselves, children generally avoided taking resources that belonged to another agent and instead favored their own resources (Experiments 1 and 2...

Access to and control of resources is a major source of costly conflicts. Animals, under some conditions, respect what others control and use (i.e., possession). Humans not only respect possession of resources, they also respect ownership. Ownership can be viewed as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals inhibit their tendency to take others’...

There has been extensive research into the development of selective trust in testimony, but little is known about the development of selective trust in promises. The present research investigates children's (N = 264) selective trust in others' promises to help. In Study 1, 6‐year‐olds selectively trusted speakers who had previously kept a promise....

We elevate our constructions to a special status in our minds. This 'IKEA' effect leads us to believe that our creations are more valuable than items that are identical, but constructed by another. This series of studies utilises a developmental perspective to explore why this bias exists. Study 1 elucidates the ontogeny of the IKEA effect, demonst...

Promises are speech acts that create an obligation to do the promised action. In three studies, we investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 278) understand the normative implications of promising in prosocial interactions. In Study 1, children helped a partner who promised to share stickers. When the partner failed to uphold the promise, 3- and...

When an object comes into possession, the owner will typically think that it is worth more than it did before they owned the item in a bias known as the endowment effect. This bias is particularly robust in Western societies with independent self-construals, but has not been observed in children below 5–6years of age. In three studies, we investiga...

Recently, Krupenye, Rosati & Hare (KRH henceforth) reported that bonobos and chimpanzees show ‘human-like framing effects’ in a food choice task [[1][1]]. Chimpanzees and bonobos could choose between a ‘framed’ option of fruit and an alternative option of peanuts (matched in expected value

Young children often treat robots as social agents after they have witnessed interactions that can be interpreted as social. We studied in three experiments whether four-year-olds from three cultures (China, Japan, UK) and adults from two cultures (Japan, UK) will attribute ownership of objects to a robot that engages in social gaze with a human. P...

Western preschool children often assign ownership based on first possession and some theorists have proposed that this judgment might be an early emerging, innate bias. Five- to 9-year-olds (n = 112) from a small-scale group in Kenya (Kikuyu) watched videotaped interactions of two women passing an object. The object's starting position and the wome...

Children are born into a world abundant with social norms that prescribe how one should and should not behave. Social norms also form the basis of more complex social institutions such as ownership that create obligations, rights and duties. As adults we typically navigate our social world effortlessly and mostly unaware of the intricate web of soc...

Creative labour has an effect on children's and adults' ownership decisions in Western cultures. We investigated whether preschoolers and adults from an Eastern culture (Japan) would show a similar bias. In a first-party task (Experiment 1), in which participants created their own objects, Japanese preschoolers but not adults assigned ownership to...

Young children often use simple rules of thumb to infer ownership of objects, but do they also understand ownership rights? We investigated whether 2- and 3-year-olds would react to violations of ownership rights in the context of newly made objects. In Experiment 1, children protested and made spontaneous reference to ownership when a puppet took...

People often assign ownership to the person who has invested labor into making an object (labor rule). However, labor usually improves objects and increases their value, and it has not been investigated whether these considerations underlie people's use of the labor rule. We presented participants with third-party ownership conflicts between an own...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043979.].

MERIT IS A KEY PRINCIPLE OF FAIRNESS: rewards should be distributed according to how much someone contributed to a task. Previous research suggests that children have an early ability to take merit into account in third-party situations but that merit-based sharing in first-party contexts does not emerge until school-age. Here we provide evidence t...

When learning about the world, one of the most valuable sources of information is other people. Even very young children are sensitive to signs that they are being taught; under normal teaching situations, speakers give clear pedagogical cues including eye contact, joint reference, and verbal cues (e.g., “watch this”). This pedagogical cueing was p...

Social network analysis offers new tools to study the social structure of primate groups. We used social network analysis to investigate the cohesiveness of a grooming network in a captive chimpanzee group (N = 17) and the role that individuals may play in it. Using data from a year-long observation, we constructed an unweighted social network of p...

The endowment effect describes the bias that people often value things that they possess more than things they do not possess. Thus, they are often reluctant to trade items in their possession for items of equivalent value. Some nonhuman primates appear to share this bias with humans, but it remains an open question whether they show endowment effe...

Recognizing property ownership is of critical importance in social interactions, but little is known about how and when this attribute emerges. We investigated whether preschool children and adults believe that ownership of one person's property is transferred to a second person following the second person's investment of creative labor in that pro...

In this study we show that bonobos and capuchin monkeys can learn to search in the middle of a landmark configuration in a small-scale space. Five bonobos (Pan paniscus) and 2 capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) were tested in a series of experiments with the expansion test paradigm. The primates were trained to search in the middle of a 4- or 2-landma...

Animals commonly use feature and spatial strategies when remembering places of interest such as food sources or hiding places. We conducted three experiments with great apes to investigate strategy preferences and factors that may shape them. In the first experiment, we trained 17 apes to remember 12 different food locations on the floor of their s...