Below, you’ll find a summary of some of the questions our lab explores:
What behaviors sustain cooperative relationships?
Cooperative relationships draw on a suite of different behaviors, including generosity, fairness, honesty, trustworthiness, forgiveness, partner choice, and—perhaps counterintuitively—punishment. We use behavioral tasks that measure cooperative behaviors in contexts in which real resources are at stake. We complement these behavioral activities with story- and interview-based tasks in which children respond to scenarios that call upon an understanding of cooperative decision-making. The lab’s research on punishment has also expanded into a larger program exploring justice-related responses to wrongdoing
Representative Projects:
Reputation of Costly Signaling (ROCS): This project explores whether the presence of an observer increases children’s willingness to pay a cost to prevent unfair resource distributions. We are also interested in how children engage in costly third-party punishment when they first have the opportunity to engage in pro-social, helping behavior.
Partner Choice with Economic Games (PCE): This project explores how children select partners based on social context. Specifically, we examine whether children’s decisions to switch partners are influenced by new partners’ prior behavior (i.e., dividing resources fairly or unfairly) and by the cost of switching (i.e., whether doing so will require them to sacrifice their own resources).
Forgiveness + Reconciliation (F+R)/ Forgiveness Effort (FE): This set of projects explores children’s developing beliefs about forgiveness, including the relationship between forgiveness and relationship repair and the role of effort in forgiveness. Through these projects, we hope to gain a greater understanding of how children understand and evaluate forgiveness as a response to transgressions.
What are the forces that shape the emergence and expression of these behaviors?
Growing up in cooperative societies presents children with a set of important challenges. Not only must they start to engage in cooperative behaviors, many of which involve overcoming the temptation to be selfish, but children must follow the norms that prescribe which specific forms of cooperative behaviors are locally appropriate. Our lab uses a cross-cultural, developmental approach to understand cooperative norm learning, conformity, and enforcement.
Representative Projects:
Reaching: This project uses motion tracking software to assess children’s automatic/spontaneous behavior by measuring their reach trajectories when engaging in a resource allocation task. Using this technology, we are hoping to also investigate the degree of conflict children experience when making these decisions and whether this declines as children age and are more inclined to fair distributions.
Parental Partiality (PPXC): This project examines the conditions under which children in India, Korea, Peru, Uganda, and the US view partial resource distributions as expected, permissible, and normative, offering insight into how cultural context shapes developing intuitions about legitimate routes to inequality.
What real-world conditions support or suppress cooperation?
Cooperation is a part of our everyday lives, yet it is not always easy or even possible. We can all point to situations that feel more or less conducive to cooperation. One key aim of our lab’s research program is to understand the kinds of situations that best promote cooperation and those that suppress it. One example is that we study how group membership influences decision-making, with a particular focus on gender and inequality.
Representative Projects:
Inherit: This project explores the extent to which children’s sharing behavior and perception of resources are dependent on whether resources are self-acquired or inherited.
Group Forgiveness (G4) / Group Forgiveness Groups (G4G): This set of projects explores how children, adolescents, and adults think differently about interpersonal and intergroup conflict resolution. This work also aims to investigate the role of group membership on child and adult conceptions of conflict resolution.
Intergroup Conflict Resolution (ICR): Across four continents, this project examines whether children understand the difference between recent and multigenerational ethnonational conflicts