Abstract
During their third year of life, toddlers become increasingly skillful at coordinating their actions with peer partners and they form joint commitments in collaborative situations. However, little effort has been made to explain interindividual differences in collaboration among toddlers. Therefore, we examined the relative influence of distinct individual, dyadic, and social factors on toddlers' collaborative activities (i.e., level of coordination and preference for joint activity) in joint problem-solving situations with unfamiliar peer partners (n = 23 dyads aged M = 35.7 months). We analyzed the dyadic nonindependent data with mixed models. Results indicated that mothers' expectations regarding their children's social behaviors significantly predicted toddlers' level of coordination. Furthermore, the models revealed that toddlers' positive mutual experiences with the unfamiliar partner assessed during an initial free play period (Phase 1) and their level of coordination in an obligatory collaboration task (Phase 2) promoted toddlers' preference for joint activity in a subsequent optional collaboration task (Phase 3). In contrast, children's mastery motivation and shyness conflicted with their collaborative efforts. We discuss the role of parents' socialization goals in toddlers' development toward becoming active collaborators and discuss possible mechanisms underlying the differences in toddlers' commitment to joint activities, namely social preferences and the trust in reliable cooperation partners.
Highlights
The last decades have seen an ongoing interest in a social behavior, cooperation, of which humans, among vertebrate species, provide outstanding examples
The major concern of the present study is to rectify this lacuna by answering the question: How can we further explain interindividual differences in early human cooperation, namely in peer collaboration among toddlers?
The main aim of the present study is to identify the relative contribution of individual, dyadic, and social factors in explaining interindividual differences in children’s collaboration, that is, (a) children’s competencies in coordinating their actions in collaborative problem-solving situations and (b) their motivation to participate and persist in collaborative activities
Summary
The last decades have seen an ongoing interest in a social behavior, cooperation, of which humans, among vertebrate species, provide outstanding examples. To conceptually describe the phenomenon of cooperation, we shall classify it according to the scheme proposed by Melis and Semmann (2010) Following these authors, cooperative behaviors (or cooperation) can be subsumed as social behaviors among two (or more) agents that either bring an immediate benefit to another conspecific (the recipient) or to both agents as an outcome of their joint coordinated actions (by the recipient and the actor). Cooperative behaviors (or cooperation) can be subsumed as social behaviors among two (or more) agents that either bring an immediate benefit to another conspecific (the recipient) or to both agents as an outcome of their joint coordinated actions (by the recipient and the actor) The former type of behaviors is typically called altruistic cooperation (e.g., helping, sharing, or comforting); the latter, mutualistic cooperation. Collaboration is an instance of mutualistic cooperation or mutualism (see Tomasello et al, 2012; Warneken and Melis, 2012). we shall refer to an elementary form of collaboration within the scope of this article, that is, to dyadic (i.e., smallscale) cooperation with immediate and synchronous benefits for both interaction partners
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