Social evaluation of co-action partners: Children’s partner recruitment in cooperation and competition tasks

Social evaluations are a pervasive feature of human thinking. Studies on selective trust, selective social learning, and helping – that is, in cooperative contexts – have shown that children become competent social decision-makers in their preschool years. Choosing partners based on relevant attributes is equally important for success in competitive situations, however. To test predictions from a dual-process account of children’s development of reasoning abilities, we devised two online experiments for 4- to 7-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were introduced to a weak and to a strong model and had the opportunity to apply this information strategically in competitive and cooperative domain-relevant games (requiring strength) and in a domain-irrelevant game (requiring object labelling knowledge). Children recruited the optimal partner in both contexts from around 5 years of age and generalized partner expertise to novel domains. Experiment 2 was designed to shed light on the reasoning process underlying partner recruitment choices. Children were introduced to a weak but smart and a strong but ignorant model and had the opportunity to apply this information in games of different domain-context combinations. Contrary to our expectations, even the oldest children performed poorly. Our findings are at odds with previous research showing that 4-year-olds rationally recruited optimal partners for cooperative tasks. Children may have struggled with the unfamiliar first-person perspective, and the difficulty of the task when they had to consider multiple agent characteristics at once.