Chapter 1: What cultural factors influence children's cooperation?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. Many of us believe kids naturally grow into being good people. But what if what counts as good, fair, honest, and cooperative depends entirely on where you're growing up and who's watching? What if kids don't naturally cooperate all the time?
Well, that's what we're going to discuss with someone who's researched this. She is a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University, and her name is Dorsa Amir. Dorsa, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on.
I sort of picture moral development and I assume that kids are on this like universal path to it.
Chapter 2: How does Dorsa Amir's research challenge common beliefs about children's morality?
I'm sure some kids will stray because of environmental factors, but that there's this innate fairness and sharing vibe that we all have. Does your research basically say not so fast with my point of view?
Well, it's interesting that you should ask that, actually, because it's a little bit of both. So my background is in psychology and anthropology, and I've always been really interested in how culture shapes people's behaviors. And in this paper that recently came out, we really wanted to investigate this exact question.
What aspects of the development of cooperation are consistent across really diverse cultures, including hunter horticulturalists in the Amazon and our very nice neighbors up north in Canada across five different countries? And what are the aspects that seem to vary? And we find a little bit of both, actually.
It turns out at younger ages, kids tend to be a bit more self-interested, but as they get older, they really start taking on the norms of their culture.
I love that young kids, five years old approximately, start off a little self-interested.
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Chapter 3: What methods are used to study cooperation among children?
It is a little relatable. Is it that kids are sort of like little mini resource hoarders at first and then they kind of grow out of it?
Well, as the mother of a four-year-old, I can tell you at least my sample size of one at home, that's likely true. I think, you know, humans are really interesting in that we cooperate at scales that are just unprecedented in the animal kingdom. We're cooperating right now. We just met. Our listeners are cooperating by giving us their attention.
I'm hopefully cooperating by being engaging and polite.
You are. Thank you.
Chapter 4: How do children's self-interests evolve with age?
And thank you for that.
And, you know, I think what's really interesting about a lot of the choices that we make that distinguish us in many ways from non-human primates is that we often make decisions that are costly to ourselves in the short run. But if everyone does it and we all coordinate, then we're all better off in the long run.
So, for instance, David, if you have four candies in your hand and you're asked to share some with me, Maybe you just want to keep all of them to yourself. But if you share, let's say, two of them with me and I benefit from that, then the next time I have four candies, maybe I'll share some with you.
So on the long run, if we play this out many times, these kinds of costly actions can actually be beneficial. But it's hard to do because you really want those candies. And this is the kind of choice that children are facing all the time.
And it turns out it just takes a lot of time and a lot of cultural input and experience to really, I think, internalize that and understand and be able to make those short-term decisions with this idea potentially that in the long run they're going to benefit you.
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Chapter 5: What role does cultural context play in children's understanding of fairness?
So how do you test for this? You give kids a bunch of candies. I think Starburst was one of them. I'm not a fan, so I wouldn't want them shared with me. But this is not an ad or a hit piece for Starburst. You give these kids candy and then you just kind of observe how they act with each other.
That's right. And David, if you didn't like Starburst, you would be excluded from our study, in fact. But this is one of the cross-cultural universals that I have documented, is that virtually all the children in all these studies told us that they liked candy and they could participate.
So essentially, we do a lot of these tasks very much like how I described, which is that we set up different situations for kids and we ask them to make real decisions about how to allocate different resources.
Chapter 6: How do children learn and internalize social norms?
And so in some of our experiments, we used Starburst. Skittles and some we use Starburst. We're using stickers, like things that kids really like and have an affinity for. And we make these very simple types of distribution decisions. So for instance, I might say, okay, the first child who's here is going to get four candies. The other one is going to get one.
And then we ask the first child, what do you think we should do? Should we enact this? Do you think this is fair? Or do you think we should reject this?
Chapter 7: What conclusions can be drawn about morality in children from this research?
And what you find is that at younger ages in these types of tasks, children are like, yes, please. They say yes to that decision. They get four. The other person gets one. Even though they have more and it's unfair, it's unfair in their favor. They don't seem to be that averse to that decision.
But as they get older, in some cultures, it turns out that accepting a distribution like that is not the nice thing to do. In fact, we found that we talked in addition to testing kids in these tasks, we also talked to other kids in the community and we talked to adults in the community.
And what turns out happening is that what the adults say is the right thing to do is actually where children's behavior starts guiding them. And so even though different adults disagree about what the right thing to do is, it seems that children are going through this process in very similar ways and are integrating the local norms of their culture.
And the way we talk about it in the paper is there are just many different routes to cooperation. And to be a good cooperator in one society just has different norms attached to it. And children seem to be really sophisticated at learning and integrating that information into their behavior through middle childhood.
I thought of fairness as this sort of gold standard for being morally good. But are there different forms of cooperation and logic here that are equally as valid that you observed in countries that maybe aren't, I don't know, North American?
Yeah, this is so interesting, this idea of fairness. So we all, I think, share this sense that some things are unfair and some things are not. But it turns out that this is quite culturally variable.
And I and my colleagues and lots of other researchers in this field have published and experimented in this space of when we say something is fair, that's actually often a culturally constructed idea. Fair is not fair everywhere is another way to put it. And so what we really wanted to do in this study is take those cultural assumptions out.
And just again, instead of testing kids and coming back home and pontificating about what they did, we really wanted to contextualize what we were seeing in their actual communities. And so we had participants and researchers and researchers. children and adults of all ages tell us. And we had these interviews where we explain the situation and we really wanted to learn what they thought.
And what we found was that, you know, the American concept of fairness, for instance, that it's rude or unfair to accept having more than someone else, that itself seems to be something that's culturally variable.
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