Building Bridges: Exploring Cooperation in Children

When children play, how do they develop the essential skill of cooperation? What methods do they use to solve complex problems while working in teams? How do they approach a threshold dilemma when their personal interests are at odds with the team’s objectives? 

In this episode of Under the Cortex, host Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum speaks with Patricia Kanngiesser from the University of Plymouth. Kanngiesser, who is a cross-cultural and developmental psychologist, highlights the findings from a recent article in Psychological Science and discusses how children learn to navigate teamwork. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at  [email protected].

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:08.460] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Cooperation is a cornerstone of human interaction, essential for solving complex problems. How do children learn to cooperate and what factors influence their ability to work together? I am Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. In this episode of Under the Cortex, we will talk about the latest research Dr. John, How Children Navigate Team. I’m joined by Patricia Kanngiesser. Patricia recently published an article in APS’s journal, Psychological Science: Exploring How Different types of feedback Effect Children’s Cooperative Behavior. Patricia, welcome to Under the Cortex.

[00:00:48.860] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Great. Thank you for having me today.

[00:00:51.800] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Let me start with our classical question. What type of psychologist are you?

[00:00:57.470] – Patricia Kanngiesser

I would say I’m a cross-cultural and I’m an environmental psychologist, so I’m someone who’s interested in social behavior, how people behave across the world, and how kids grow up to become competent members of their society.

[00:01:11.160] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, we will talk about the cross-world part when we talk about your study. Let me ask you this, what initially got you interested in studying dynamics of cooperation?

[00:01:22.040] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Well, I would say cooperation is unique to our species. No other species on the planet cooperates as much and as well as humans do. But on the other hand, we often fail at some of the most fundamental tasks that we face as a society. There’s this tension that we are this uniquely cooperative species. On the other hand, cooperation often is really hard because there are people who might be free-writing, who who might not be pulling their weight in a cooperative endeavor. That tension is what I’m interested in.

[00:01:50.550] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, we will talk about that. In your paper, you talk about the concept threshold dilemma. What is it and why it is relevant to societal challenges?

[00:02:03.110] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Yeah, so threshold dilemmas are a particular type of social dilemma. Social dilemmas are situations where my own interest is in conflict with the interest of the broader group, where I have to pay costs in the short term to benefit the group and potentially myself in the long term. Threshold dilemmas are these dilemmas where everyone in the group, ideally, or at least a group as a whole, needs to reach a certain threshold for example, with their contributions for the group benefits to be available to everyone. There are these one-off dilemma. It’s not sufficient to just contribute a little bit. We need to reach a threshold for the group benefits to become available. They’re a particular type of social dilemma.

[00:02:47.060] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, so that is great to hear. I want to ask you a little bit more details about your design because I think it is brilliant. So your study used real water, which was, I think, fun, right? Because We are talking about children. It’s a resource in a public goods game. How did this design help children to approach the experiment in an engaging and meaningful way for them?

[00:03:13.660] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Yeah, so as you said, This was a study for children. We’re talking about children aged five and upwards. I don’t know any child who does not like playing with water. We tried this with adults, and they really enjoyed this as well. Our idea was to create a study that was very tangible and physical, where children could really see what they’re doing. They could physically see how they all got a water bottle. Everyone was sitting in front of their own little water bottle. They saw how much water they had. If they pressed a tab, their own water level would be lowered and the water would go into a common pool, a central pool with a threshold. All of that was really physical and tangible. There are two reasons for doing this. One is the reason you already mentioned, it makes it more engaging, it makes it more interesting, it makes it more fun, but it also makes it easier for children to understand what’s going on because everything is happening in front of their eyes. It’s physically right there. We tend to try to do this when we design studies for children to make it as tangible and physical as possible because we really know that it helps their understanding, but also engagement and enjoyment of the game.

[00:04:19.710] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, we will talk more about that. In your study, you’ll talk about feedback and relative feedback, basically seeing others’ outcomes. How did that differ from individual feedback and what impact did each have on cooperation among children?

[00:04:39.300] – Patricia Kanngiesser

We know from past research, for example, that seeing how well others do, and in a particular situation, being able to compare what I have to what others have or what I get to what others get, can drive competition because people try to out-compete each other. They try to do better than the other person. Whereas if people only see how well they do them themselves, that competition is often diminished. What we were interested in in this particular study is looking how that would impact cooperation. If people see how much others are getting out of the game and can compare their own outcomes to that of others, does that mean they’re then less likely to cooperate because they’re saying, Oh, look at those guys. I think they’re free riding. They’re not pulling their weight. Why should I be the one contributing and not get as much out of it as others? We had a situation where basically children saw how much water they had collected at the end of each round, and they could compare the water levels to that of other children, or they only saw how much they got. I only know how well I’m doing.

[00:05:43.390] – Patricia Kanngiesser

We found that over rounds, there was a small effect. In the groups that saw others’ outcomes, the cooperation decreased a little bit more than in other groups where I only saw how much I got. But overall, cooperation was really high in the game, surprisingly so. The majority The majority of groups cooperated throughout the game and across all rounds of the game.

[00:06:04.360] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

You said it is good news. Children, in fact, enjoyed cooperation. Let’s talk about communication a little bit in your study. What role do you think communication played in maintaining cooperation during the game? How did communication differ between the different feedback conditions?

[00:06:23.720] – Patricia Kanngiesser

That’s an excellent question. One thing to know about our particular study was it It was set up in a way that children… It was a group of three children playing. They had everything physically in front of them, their own water bottle, the common pool that they were contributing to, a little animal that was in the pool and that was thirsty and needed water to drink. If a threshold was reached, the animal was happy and gave them additional water. But that also meant that children were physically in the room together, so they could talk to each other. They could communicate about the game. The reason, again, we set the game up this way is because we were interested interested in what children would talk about during the game. What would they say to each other? Would they try to coordinate with each other? Would they try to encourage other children to give more water? Would they talk about the common goal that they try to reach? We know from studies with adults that having the opportunity to communicate in a situation like case, social dilemma, or where a corporation might be challenging otherwise, we know that communication generally increases cooperation rates because people can talk about the situation at hand, they can make promises and commitments to each other.

[00:07:36.150] – Patricia Kanngiesser

So generally, being able to talk and communicate does increase cooperation. But in this particular situation, the advantage for us was also to get insight into the communicative processes and strategies that happened while the children were playing the game. For example, they talked about the common goal, they mentioned that. They also talked about giving water, they talked about stopping to give water, and they tried to encourage each other to contribute. We found, for example, that in the what we call relative feedback condition, so the condition where children could see how much water others had connected, where competition was increased We found that in that condition, children talk more. Just the frequency of communication increased, but also what they talked about was interesting. They talked more about giving water. They talked about their own contribution, but also encouraged others more to give. We interpreted this as children reacting to the challenges of this situation by increasing their efforts to verbally coordinate. There was slightly fewer of those utterances in the situation that they only saw how much water outcomes they had. This is interesting that the verbal communication gives us some insight into what was happening. The last thing I almost forgot to mention it, also in the condition where they could make social comparisons, they also verbalized those more often.

[00:08:59.300] – Patricia Kanngiesser

They were clearly reacting to what was happening. That was also a good feedback for us to see that our manipulation was actually noticed by children.

[00:09:08.910] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, no, that’s great. As a language researcher, former language researcher, I’m really interested in this. To clarify, when people, these children, see each other and when they see what others do, they are willing to cooperate more and they communicate more. Is that right?

[00:09:28.580] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Yeah, I would say so. Generally in the game that we have, because they can talk to each other, it gives them an opportunity to verbally coordinate and communicate. There is this interesting split in a way. We find that cooperation rates go down a little bit if they see how much everyone else has. But At the same time, they’re trying to counter that, I believe, by talking more about what they need to do. I think we have these two things working against each other. I think this is also why we’re finding that and the thresholds, I think, are also why we’re finding that cooperation doesn’t drop down as much as we expected it to. I think the communication itself, but also having this very clear threshold and very clear goal, work in unison to help children actually achieve really high levels of cooperation.

[00:10:15.410] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that because I wasn’t clear about that. Can we say, when they see what others do, they have a general sense of what is going on. Maybe they don’t feel the urge to cooperate as much compared to other conditions, but maybe they feel that they are already cooperating by providing information or talking to each other.

[00:10:36.900] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Yeah, that’s a very important question. Some people would also say that providing information is a form of cooperation. It’s a It’s a low-cost form of cooperation, but that might be… I might, for example, be volunteering and saying, I already gave so much. It’s your turn, guys. I could still be deceiving you because there’s no way for others to see how much I’m giving. That’s in a way in a challenge. Talk is cheap. If you have no option to verify in the moment whether what I say is true, then I can say a lot of things. But assuming that I’m a trustworthy speaker, Hopefully, whatever I say is correct and might encourage you to act as well. That is the challenge of what is happening, right? It’s trying to see, can I trust others? Are they really saying and doing what they say they do? Or are they trying to deceive me?

[00:11:30.430] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, that’s right. This brings me to my next question. How does this research on children’s cooperation inform our general understanding of how social comparisons can undermine or support collective action in real-world contexts?

[00:11:47.840] – Patricia Kanngiesser

That’s, again, a really good question. The effect of social comparisons or the opportunity to compare your own performance or outcome to others is really context-dependent independent. In situations where what I do only has consequences for myself, my own work, my own activities are independent of other people, what has been found in the literature in these situations is that actually social comparisons help increase productivity. People can compare themselves to others and they actually become more productive. However, in situations where we are interdependent, where my activities and my behavior interrelates with yours, where what I do and what you do both influence each other. Social dilemmas are a situation where that is the case, where our behaviors are interdependent. In these situations, it has been found that in these situations, social comparisons can be really detrimental because people start free riding, they start competing with each other, they think others are not pulling their weight. The general idea is that in these interdependent situations, social comparisons can be detrimental to operation. But just to make it a bit more complicated, but what we’re finding in our study is that if children have a very clear goal, they have a very clear idea of what they’re working towards, and they have the opportunity to communicate, we can mitigate these effects, and we can still maintain really high levels of cooperation.

[00:13:19.980] – Patricia Kanngiesser

We have different factors working against each other and balancing each other out in a way.

[00:13:26.000] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, many factors, in fact. To go back to your study, you tested children from Germany and India. Why did you choose a cross-cultural sample to answer your questions?

[00:13:39.690] – Patricia Kanngiesser

There’s a broad answer to this, which is in a psychological and the sciences, we’re still facing this challenge that this vast majority of the data that we have and the studies we’re looking at come from a very small fraction of the world’s population. Still, the majority of studies are done with kids or adults in North America or Europe, Australia, New Zealand. Part of the aim with this study, and generally the research that I and my collaborators do, is to widen the evidence base that we have. We really try to work with populations that are still underrepresented in the literature. For example, children in India are not as prominent in the developmental and social and cognitive literature as, for example, children from Europe. That’s the broader answer. India is interesting because The Indian school system, for example, is very, very competitive. There’s a lot of children in a classroom, and my collaborators in India always tell me that there’s this real sense of trying to get ahead of everyone. We thought that also maybe children in India might be a bit more sensitive to this feedback about how well they do as compared to others, maybe compared to Germany, where that competition in the classroom isn’t quite as pronounced as it is in Indian classrooms.

[00:14:59.760] – Patricia Kanngiesser

We We didn’t find any differences, which is interesting. They both reacted equally to the experimental manipulation. Overall, children cooperated really high rates. They reacted similarly to the feedback manipulation. Where we found interesting nuances is in the communication, in the communicative patterns. But we can also talk about this if you want to get into this or not.

[00:15:23.650] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, I do. It is my question about the similarities and differences. What are the most important What different similarities you found between the two groups of children then?

[00:15:34.140] – Patricia Kanngiesser

The similarities are they all cooperate at high rates, but they’re also susceptible to feedback to some extent. We find the same pattern. The game had multiple rounds, and we found the same pattern over rounds in both contexts so that the longer the game went on, the more pronounced differences became in outcomes. Some groups stopped cooperating, basically, over rounds, and that was more pronounced in the later rounds than in the earlier rounds. The overall behavioral patterns are very similar. The overall communicative patterns are also similar in terms of children overall talking more in the social comparison relative feedback condition, and also talking more about giving water. The broad patterns are very similar. The nuances come in in how children talk to each other. The children in Germany, for example, They mentioned themselves and others at about equal rates, but the kids in India talk more about others. Their focus was more on what others were doing or what others should be doing, which fits with what we know from other studies about cultural modes of communication, where in the Indian context, it’s more other-focused a little bit, the communication, and less about the self. That’s how we’re interpreting the pattern that we’re finding.

[00:16:56.150] – Patricia Kanngiesser

It’s nuances, but it’s more the how, not the what.

[00:17:01.020] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, you explained it very clearly. We see a similar trend, but how they do it can be slightly different. Just to clarify, we see the same trend, that in the relative threshold condition, they communicate more, but they actually cooperate less compared to the other condition. Exactly. Yeah, I find that really interesting. It is like talk more, do less type of approach. Let’s talk a little bit about negative effects of social comparison. Your research found that thresholds can mitigate some of the negative effects. How might this apply to addressing large-scale societal issues like climate change? It is one of the examples you used in your paper.

[00:17:44.120] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Yeah. Obviously, we always need to be careful to extrapolate from one study with kids to the broader.

[00:17:50.860] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Of course.

[00:17:52.190] – Patricia Kanngiesser

I’m not suggesting we can solve climate change. But what I think is there are some lessons to be learned from this and also in line with what we in the literature. One takeaway message I would say we get from this study is that having clear and unambiguous goals is very, very important for enabling cooperation We also know that from studies with adults. But if there’s a clear limit, if there’s a clear goal, there’s a clear threshold that we’re all working towards, and that is clearly communicated, it’s unambiguous. Everyone is in the know. Everyone knows what’s happening. Everyone knows what we’re working towards. That does really help in stabilizing and fostering cooperation.

[00:18:36.310] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

I want to talk about another general societal issue, gender differences. We’re Are there any notable differences in how boys and girls cooperated during the game? How do these findings fit with previous research on gender and prosocial behavior?

[00:18:56.080] – Patricia Kanngiesser

A very good question. We found a slight gender effect. We found that groups of girls cooperated somewhat more than groups of boys. Generally speaking, the literature on gender effects and prosocial behavior is not very clear. There are some studies that find gender effects. There’s other studies that don’t find them. There’s a recent paper looking at a large cross-cultural data set on children’s prosocial behavior. They didn’t find any gender effects. I wouldn’t overinterpret the gender effect It’s in one particular study necessarily, just because we’re finding that it can go one way or the other. I would say at the moment, we don’t have a very clear picture about how gender and prosociality relate and if there are pronounced gender effects. At the moment, I would be more on the side of the skeptics. I don’t know how stable these effects are.

[00:19:55.990] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, and we don’t always need to find gender differences. There can be gender similarities, too, and maybe we should be talking more about that sometime.

[00:20:04.640] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Also, the way we set up the study is, and again, this is one of these pragmatic decisions that you make when you design and expand, and is that we had gender-homogeneous groups. We only had groups of boys, we only had groups of girls. We never tested mixed-gender groups because we thought that would introduce an additional variable, and we just wanted to control for that. But obviously, you could also have gender-mixed groups and see how they do. In real life, that’s often the reality, is that we don’t necessarily work in all male or female groups. We often work in gender-mixed groups anyway. Yes, that would be an interesting question for future research.

[00:20:41.770] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, exactly. Let’s talk about some real-world applications. What are some potentials for this research, particularly when it comes to encouraging cooperation on a global scale? What are your thoughts?

[00:20:58.420] – Patricia Kanngiesser

I would say kids can do it. Look at the kids. They are all right. They can do it. Again, I think what we can take away is that, yes, cooperation is hard, but there are factors that are conducive to fostering cooperation and things like getting people in the room, getting them to talk to each other, being clear about the goals of the particular situation, what are we trying to achieve? That really seems to lead to really high cooperation rate, making things tangible, giving people tangible things to look at and see that their actions have an effect. These are all the things that we put in place because we knew this was a study for kids, so it needed to have all of these components. But I don’t see a reason why this shouldn’t be applied potentially also to adults. If there’s a takeaway message, I would say that’s probably it. Clear goals and giving people the option to talk about those goals and having a clarity about what the goals are. That sounds trivial, but often a lot of misunderstandings and challenges arise because people do not necessarily know what the shared goal is or don’t even see that there might be a shared goal that they might be aiming for.

[00:22:14.930] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, that’s a great takeaway for the podcast. I really appreciate that. Giving adults clear goals, share goals, and let them play and hope for the best. That is such a positive attitude about all our global problems. I love that.

[00:22:33.660] – Patricia Kanngiesser

Yeah, I think one has to stay optimistic.

[00:22:35.870] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Yeah, I agree. Patricia, thank you very much for joining us today. This was a great conversation.

[00:22:43.450] – Patricia Kanngiesser

It’s been a pleasure.

[00:22:44.700] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum

Thank you for having me. This is Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum with APS, and I have been speaking with Patricia Kanngiesser from the University of Plymoth. If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. Do you have questions or suggestions for us, please contact us at [email protected].