Three-Year-Olds' Reactions to a Partner's Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment.
Abstract
When children make a joint commitment to collaborate, obligations are created. Pairs
of 3-year-old children (N = 144) made a joint commitment to play a game. In three
different conditions the game was interrupted in the middle either because: (a) the
partner child intentionally defected, (b) the partner child was ignorant about how
to play, or (c) the apparatus broke. The subject child reacted differently in the
three cases, protesting normatively against defection (with emotional arousal and
later tattling), teaching when the partner seemed to be ignorant, or simply blaming
the apparatus when it broke. These results suggest that 3-year-old children are competent
in making appropriate normative evaluations of intentions and obligations of collaborative
partners.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14609Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1111/cdev.12816Publication Info
Kachel, Ulrike; Svetlova, Margarita; & Tomasello, Michael (2017). Three-Year-Olds' Reactions to a Partner's Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment.
Child Dev. 10.1111/cdev.12816. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14609.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
Collections
More Info
Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Margarita Lvovna Svetlova
Assistant Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
This author no longer has a Scholars@Duke profile, so the information shown here reflects
their Duke status at the time this item was deposited.
Michael Tomasello
James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor
Major research interests in processes of social cognition, social learning, cooperation,
and communication from developmental, comparative, and cultural perspectives. Current
theoretical focus on processes of shared intentionality. Empirical research mainly
with human children from 1 to 4 years of age and great apes.
Alphabetical list of authors with Scholars@Duke profiles.

Articles written by Duke faculty are made available through the campus open access policy. For more information see: Duke Open Access Policy
Rights for Collection: Scholarly Articles
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info