How do children learn to cooperate with others? A new cross-cultural study suggests that the answer depends less on universal rules and more on the social norms surrounding the child.
In the study, researchers examined how more than 400 children ages five to 13 from the United States, Canada, Peru, Uganda and the Shuar communities of Ecuador behaved in situations involving fairness, trust, forgiveness and honesty. The team also surveyed children and adults in each community to understand what people believed was the “right” thing to do.
The results show that while young children across cultures begin with similar, largely self-interested behavior (what maximizes resources for them, individually), their choices diverge over time in ways that reflect local cultural norms.
“We wanted to try and map the regularities and variation in how cooperation develops, and what it looks like across different cultures, which was the impetus for the cross-cultural developmental angle,” said Dorsa Amir, assistant professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. “We wanted to uncover the roots of human cooperation, which surpass those of all other species in scale and flexibility.” m
From shared beginnings to cultural pathways
To look at how children make choices, researchers played a set of four simple games with them, where the children were asked to make choices about sharing resources (in this case, Starbursts), returning favors, forgiving mistakes, and telling the truth, often at a cost to themselves. Together, the games measured how children think about fairness, trust, forgiveness, and honesty in everyday social situations. Across all five societies, younger children tended to prioritize their own interests. But as children entered middle childhood, defined as roughly between ages eight and 13, their behavior increasingly aligned with their community’s values.
In some societies, children became more likely to reject unfair advantages or share their candy with anonymous others. In Shuar hunter-horticulturalist communities in Amazonian Ecuador, children focused on not wasting resources and getting the most out of what they had, which matched up with how their society functioned. In those areas of Ecuador, where resources are sometimes scarce, it may be more important for people to minimize waste than spread resources out equally.
“In cross-cultural research, it’s common to measure behavior and then speculate about the causes,” said Amir. “But we wanted to contextualize the work: to actually talk to people in these communities and understand how those choices fit their environment. What we find is that in places like Ecuador, these behaviors aren’t breaking a norm, they are the norm.”
Importantly, the researchers emphasize that these differences should not be interpreted as some children being more or less “moral” than others. Instead, children appear to be learning what kinds of cooperation make sense in their social world.
Learning what’s ‘right’, and when to act on it
To better understand how social norms shape behavior, the research team compared what adults believed others should do with what children actually did when faced with cooperative tasks.
They found that, in many cases, children’s behavior gradually moved closer to adult norms over time, especially when it came to fairness and trust. However, for some behaviors, such as honesty, children often knew the “right” thing to do before consistently acting on it.
Forgiveness stood out as an exception. Across all five societies, both children and adults showed strong agreement that accidental mistakes should be forgiven.
Different strategies for cooperation
Rather than showing a single, general tendency to cooperate, children in the study followed one of three distinct strategies: maximizing personal gain, cooperating broadly with unknown others, or cooperating selectively depending on the situation.
The prevalence of these strategies changed with age and differed across societies. In more industrialized societies, children were more likely to cooperate with strangers, perhaps because that was rewarded in their everyday life. But in societies where people rely more on close relationships and resources are scarce, children were more likely to focus on using the resources they have more efficiently. This, researchers said, doesn’t mean one set of children is more or less ‘cooperative’; rather, cooperation itself is culturally constructed and can take many forms.
Why middle childhood matters
The findings highlight middle childhood as a critical period for social learning, because that’s when children refine both their behavior and their understanding of how they’re supposed to act in society.
“Children become increasingly sophisticated at learning and picking up on norms through middle childhood,” said Amir. “In addition to learning the norms around them, they also start to behave more and more in line with those norms, which is sometimes hard to do because it could involve paying a cost.”
According to researchers, this extended period of learning allows children to fine-tune their behavior to fit the expectations of their community, a process that may be key to human cooperation more broadly.
Broad implications
By studying children across a wide range of cultural contexts, the research demonstrates that behaviors observed in U.S. children shouldn’t be treated as the global standard, challenging the frequent and sometimes implicit assumption that findings from Western, industrialized societies apply universally.
“It’s important to remember there isn’t one single ‘normal developmental pattern’ when it comes to behavior, because whatever we observe is happening within a culture,” said Amir. “There’s no culture-free development. You cannot take culture out of the developmental process.”
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