Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children develop a sense of joint commitment and sharedintentionality during collaborative activities, which mayproduce prosocial effects in social coordinative activities.Past studies have found mixed results on the prosocial effectof shared intentionality. We hypothesized that it is the degreeof coordination and not simply shared intentionality thatfacilitates social bonding. In a block-assembly task with 4-year-old children, we manipulated degree of coordination.Children in the continuous high-level coordination conditionwere more generous in a Dictator Game and more willing tohelp their partner complete a task, compared with childrenwho engaged in a task with the same end-product thatrequired less coordination. Surprisingly, we also found thatboys shared more resources than girls, a result that weattributed to the emphasis on the importance of generosity formales in Chinese culture.