People frequently need to cooperate despite having strong self-serving motives. In the current study, pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 160) faced a one-shot coordination problem: To benefit, children had to choose the same of 3 reward divisions. They could not communicate or see each other and thus had to accurately predict each other's choices to…

Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children…

Recent studies have shown that in situations where resources have been acquired collaboratively, children at around 3 years of age share mostly equally. We investigated 3-year-olds' sharing behavior with a collaborating partner and a free-riding partner who explicitly expressed her preference not to collaborate. Children shared more equally with…

Some children's social activities are structured by joint goals. In previous research, the criterion used to determine this was relatively weak: if the partner stopped interacting, did the child attempt to re-engage her? But re-engagement attempts could easily result from the child simply realizing that she needs the partner to reach her own goal…

Human cooperation depends on individuals caring about their reputation, and so they sometimes attempt to manage them strategically. Here we show that even 5-year-old children strategically manage their reputation. In an experimental setting, children shared significantly more resources with an anonymous recipient when (1) the child watching them…

Human cooperative communication involves both an informative intention that the recipient understands the content of the signal and also a (Gricean) communicative intention that the recipient recognizes that the speaker has an informative intention. The degree to which children understand this 2-layered nature of communication is the subject of…

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a…

Human children 18-24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees were uninterested in the social games. As an experimental manipulation, in each task the adult…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…