I’m not a little kid anymore! Reciprocal social influence in child-adult interaction

Human decisions are often influenced by other’s opinions. This process is regulated by social norms: for instance, we tend to reciprocate the consideration received from others, independently of their reliability as information sources. Nonetheless, no study to date has investigated whether and how reciprocity modulates social influence in child-adult interaction. We tested 6, 8 and 10 years old children in a novel interactive perceptual task. A child and an adult experimenter made perceptual estimates and then took turns in making a final decision, choosing between own and partner’s response. We manipulated the final choices of the adult’s partner, who in one condition chose often the child’s estimates, whereas in another condition tended to confirm her own response. Results reveal that 10 years old children indeed reciprocated the consideration received from the partner, increasing their level of conformity to the adult’s judgments when the partner had shown high consideration towards them. At the same time, 10 years old children employed more elaborate decision criteria in choosing when trusting the adult partner and did not show egocentric biases in their final decisions. Our results shed light on the development of the cognitive and normative mechanisms modulating reciprocal social influence in child-adult interaction.