Browsing by Author "Grueneisen, Sebastian"

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Open Access
Children coordinate in a recurrent social dilemma by taking turns and along dominance asymmetries
(Developmental Psychology, 2017-02-01) Grueneisen, Sebastian; Tomasello, Michael
© 2016 American Psychological Association.Humans constantly have to coordinate their decisions with others even when their interests are conflicting (e.g., when 2 drivers have to decide who yields at an intersection). So far, however, little is known about the development of these abilities. Here, we present dyads of 5-year-olds (N = 40) with a repeated chicken game using a novel methodology: Two children each steered an automated toy train carrying a reward. The trains simultaneously moved toward each other so that in order to avoid a crash-which left both children empty-handed-1 train had to swerve. By swerving, however, the trains lost a portion of the rewards so that it was in each child's interest to go straight. Children coordinated their decisions successfully over multiple rounds, and they mostly did so by taking turns at swerving. In dyads in which turn-taking was rare, dominant children obtained significantly higher payoffs than their partners. Moreover, the coordination process was more efficient in turn-taking dyads as indicated by a significant reduction in conflicts and verbal protest. These findings indicate that already by the late preschool years children can independently coordinate decisions with peers in recurrent conflicts of interest.
Open Access
Children use salience to solve coordination problems
(Developmental Science, 2015-05) Grueneisen, Sebastian; Wyman, Emily; Tomasello, Michael
Open Access
Children, chimpanzees, and bonobos adjust the visibility of their actions for cooperators and competitors.
(Sci Rep, 2017-08-17) Grueneisen, Sebastian; Duguid, Shona; Saur, Heiko; Tomasello, Michael
Chimpanzees and bonobos are highly capable of tracking other's mental states. It has been proposed, however, that in contrast to humans, chimpanzees are only able to do this in competitive interactions but this has rarely been directly tested. Here, pairs of chimpanzees or bonobos (Study 1) and 4-year-old children (Study 2) were presented with two almost identical tasks differing only regarding the social context. In the cooperation condition, players' interests were matched: they had to make corresponding choices to be mutually rewarded. To facilitate coordination, subjects should thus make their actions visible to their partner whose view was partially occluded. In the competition condition, players' interests were directly opposed: the partner tried to match the subject's choice but subjects were only rewarded if they chose differently, so that they benefited from hiding their actions. The apes successfully adapted their decisions to the social context and their performance was markedly better in the cooperation condition. Children also distinguished between the two contexts, but somewhat surprisingly, performed better in the competitive condition. These findings demonstrate experimentally that chimpanzees and bonobos can take into account what others can see in cooperative interactions. Their social-cognitive skills are thus more flexible than previously assumed.
Open Access
Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.
(Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2017-06-19) Schmelz, Martin; Grueneisen, Sebastian; Kabalak, Alihan; Jost, Jürgen; Tomasello, Michael
Humans regularly provide others with resources at a personal cost to themselves. Chimpanzees engage in some cooperative behaviors in the wild as well, but their motivational underpinnings are unclear. In three experiments, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) always chose between an option delivering food both to themselves and a partner and one delivering food only to themselves. In one condition, a conspecific partner had just previously taken a personal risk to make this choice available. In another condition, no assistance from the partner preceded the subject's decision. Chimpanzees made significantly more prosocial choices after receiving their partner's assistance than when no assistance was given (experiment 1) and, crucially, this was the case even when choosing the prosocial option was materially costly for the subject (experiment 2). Moreover, subjects appeared sensitive to the risk of their partner's assistance and chose prosocially more often when their partner risked losing food by helping (experiment 3). These findings demonstrate experimentally that chimpanzees are willing to incur a material cost to deliver rewards to a conspecific, but only if that conspecific previously assisted them, and particularly when this assistance was risky. Some key motivations involved in human cooperation thus may have deeper phylogenetic roots than previously suspected.
Open Access
“I Know You Don't Know I Know…” Children Use Second-Order False-Belief Reasoning for Peer Coordination
(Child Development, 2015-01) Grueneisen, Sebastian; Wyman, Emily; Tomasello, Michael