From what I want to do to what we decided to do: 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, honor their agreements with peers.

Sometimes we have a personal preference but we agree with others to follow a different course of action. In this study, 3- and 5-year-old children (N = 160) expressed a preference for playing a game one way and were then confronted with peers who expressed a different preference. The experimenter then either got the participants to agree with the peers explicitly or just shrugged her shoulders and moved on. The children were then left alone to play the game unobserved. Only the older children stuck to their agreement to play the game as the peers wished. These results suggest that by 5 years of age children's sense of commitment to agreements is strong enough to override their personal preferences.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Tomasello Psychology & Neuroscience