Summary: New research finds that young children are more likely to resist immediate temptations when the reward depends on both themselves and a partner, compared with situations that rely solely on their individual self-control.
Source: APS
Children Are More Willing to Delay Gratification When Cooperation Is Required
Children as young as five and six show greater self-control when a reward depends on the actions of both themselves and a peer, a new study reports. Published in Psychological Science, the experiments indicate that children are more willing to postpone immediate rewards for cooperative ends than for individual goals.
The research was conducted by Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, and Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. They adapted the classic “marshmallow test,” a well-known measure of delay of gratification, to examine how social interdependence affects children’s choices. In the traditional version of the test, a child placed alone in a room can either take a single treat immediately or wait for a short time for a second treat when the experimenter returns. The modified design tested whether children behave differently when their own reward is tied to a peer’s behavior.
More than 200 children, all between the ages of five and six, took part in the study. Pairs briefly played a simple balloon toss game to become comfortable together, then were separated into different rooms. Each child faced the same basic choice: eat the cookie in front of them right away, or wait until the experimenter returned and receive a second cookie. In the solo condition, each child’s second cookie depended only on their own choice to wait—this closely mirrored the traditional test. In the cooperative, or interdependence, condition, however, each child received a second cookie only if both members of the pair waited. This made waiting a riskier option, because a child who waited could still lose the extra treat if their partner did not.
The team ran the experiment in two diverse cultural settings: a laboratory in Germany and primary schools among the Kikuyu community in Kenya. Across both locations, children in the interdependence condition were more likely to wait for the second cookie than children in the solo condition. Additionally, Kikuyu children generally waited more often than their German peers in both conditions.
“The fact that we obtained these findings even though children could not see or communicate with each other attests to the strong motivational consequences that simply being in a cooperative context has for children from early on in development,” Grueneisen said. The researchers interpret the behavior as evidence that young children develop a sense of social obligation toward partners: they may delay a personal reward to avoid letting a partner down or because they expect accountability if they fail to cooperate.
These results suggest that even before formal schooling or adult expectations shape behavior, children are attuned to social interdependencies and may prioritize joint outcomes over immediate personal gain. That tendency has implications for understanding the early development of cooperative behavior and for educational or parenting strategies that promote teamwork and shared goals.
Source:
APS
Media Contacts:
Leah Thayer – APS
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The image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Closed access
“Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends.” Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, Esther Herrmann. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797619894205.
Abstract
Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends
Effective cooperation often requires foregoing immediate personal rewards to achieve shared, long-term benefits. Although the ability to delay gratification is widely regarded as important in children’s social-cognitive development, it has seldom been studied within cooperative decision-making contexts. In this study, 207 children completed a modified marshmallow test in which rewards were interdependently linked: children received a second treat only if both members of a pair delayed gratification. Children from two culturally distinct samples (Germany and Kenya) performed substantially better on the interdependent version than on a standard, individually based version, indicating a greater willingness to forgo immediate rewards when cooperation is at stake. These findings suggest that young children are psychologically prepared to respond to social interdependencies in ways that support cooperative success.