Mental coordination

 Humans are highly skilled at collaborating with others but what cognitive capacities make human collaboration possible? In our research, we investigate children’s developing capacities for mental coordination. This comprises a flexible understanding of how our own and others’ mental states relate to one another as well as the ability to make decisions based on what we and others “know together”. We ask, for example, how children learn to coordinate decisions with others even without communicating by drawing on joint experiences or how children reach agreements in conflicts based on a shared understanding of fairness. We also explore how chimpanzees, human’s closest evolutionary relatives, coordinate actions and decisions with conspecifics. This work aims to contribute to our understanding of the developmental and evolutionary origins of psychological mechanisms supporting human collaboration.

Trust, reciprocity, and obligations

 Cooperation is inherently risky but we can often overcome these risks by building up trust. In our research, we study the conditions under which young children develop and act on a presumption of others’ trustworthiness which allows them to initiate cooperation while avoiding exploitation. Moreover, we are interested in whether young children reciprocate others’ trust. Do they recognize when others have trusted them and does this increase their willingness to prove trustworthy? And more generally, do cooperative interactions elicit a sense of obligation in children toward their collaborative partners, previous benefactors, or team members?

Following and enforcing rules

 Human cooperation is heavily structured by norms which prescribe how people should behave in specific situations. Previous research has shown that, from a young age, children are motivated to follow norms and disapprove of others who don’t. Indeed, young children are even willing to pay a cost to punish norm violators. In real life, however, such sanctions are not always applied equally to all individuals and people sometimes turn a blind eye to the transgressions committed individuals they like, who have helped them in the past, or who belong to the same social group. In adults, this can contribute to societal problems like corruption or nepotism. We investigate the developmental origins of the tendency to enforce norms unequally as well as the cooperative motives that can give rise to this phenomenon.

 Cooperative cheating

 Humans are skilled cooperators from early in development: already in their first years, children help others in need, invest effort in collaborative tasks, return favors, and make sacrifices to their group. In the Cooperative Minds Lab, we investigate if the motives supporting these behaviors can also encourage individuals to engage in ethically questionable behaviors (imagine a politician feeling indebted to return favors to their campaign donors rather than to serve their constituents). Specifically, we examine if cooperative motives such as the motive reciprocate others’ prosocial acts, to contribute to team projects, or to help one’s ingroup can encourage young children to cheat.

Pictures: Child and partner (experimenter) during cooperation game. Photography: Manuela Missana