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Cheating is harmful to others and society at large. Promises have been shown to increase honesty in children, but their effectiveness has not been compared between different cultural contexts. In a study (2019) with 7‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 406, 48% female, middle‐class), voluntary promises reduced cheating in Indian, but not in German children. Children in both contexts cheated, but cheating rates were lower in Germany than in India. In both contexts, cheating decreased with age in the (no‐promise) control condition and was unaffected by age in the promise condition. These findings suggest that there may exist a threshold beyond which cheating cannot be further reduced by promises. This opens new research avenues on how children navigate honesty and promise norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio‐cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (AgeRange = 3.5–4.5 years; N = 144; 76♀) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio‐cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand‐ins for peers in developmental research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real‐world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over‐imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy‐two German children (AgeRange = 4.6–6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over‐imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no‐contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real‐world social agents, such as children or adults. Research Highlights: We examined children's over‐imitation from adult, child, and puppet models to validate puppetry as an approach to simulate non‐hierarchical interactions.Children imitated adults and child models at slightly higher rates than puppets.This effect was present regardless of whether the irrelevant actions involved physical contact to the reward container or not.In our study children's social learning from puppets does not match their social learning from human models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People frequently engage in dishonest behavior at a cost to others, and it is therefore beneficial to study interventions promoting honest behavior. We implemented a novel intervention that gave participants a choice to promise to be truthful or not to promise. To measure cheating behavior, we developed a novel variant of the mind game—the dice‐box game—as well as a child‐friendly sender–receiver game. Across three studies with adolescents aged 10 to 14 years (N = 640) from schools in India, we found that promises systematically lowered cheating rates compared with no‐promise control conditions. Adolescents who sent truthful messages in the sender–receiver game cheated less in the dice‐box game and promises reduced cheating in both tasks (Study 1). Promises in the dice‐box game remained effective when negative externalities (Study 2) or incentives for competition (Study 3) were added. A joint analysis of data from all three studies revealed demographic variables that influenced cheating. Our findings confirm that promises have a strong, binding effect on behavior and can be an effective intervention to reduce cheating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been extensive research into the development of selective trust in testimony, but little is known about the development of selective trust in promises. The present research investigates children's (N = 264) selective trust in others' promises to help. In Study 1, 6-year-olds selectively trusted speakers who had previously kept a promise. In Study 2, 5-year-olds displayed selective trust for speakers who had previously kept a prosocial promise (promise to help). In Study 3, 5-year-olds trusted a speaker, who kept a prosocial promise, over a helper. These data suggest that from the age of 5 children show selective trust in others' promises using prosociality, promise keeping, or both to inform their judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western preschool children often assign ownership based on first possession and some theorists have proposed that this judgment might be an early emerging, innate bias. Five- to 9-year-olds (n = 112) from a small-scale group in Kenya (Kikuyu) watched videotaped interactions of two women passing an object. The object's starting position and the women's gestures were varied. Use of the first possession heuristic increased with age, and 8- to 9-year-olds performed similarly to German 5-year-olds (n = 24). Starting position and gestures had no effect. A control study confirmed that 5-year-old Kikuyus (n = 20) understood the video material. The findings reveal that the first possession heuristic follows different developmental trajectories cross-culturally and stress the role of children's sociocultural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative labour has an effect on children's and adults' ownership decisions in Western cultures. We investigated whether preschoolers and adults from an Eastern culture ( Japan) would show a similar bias. In a first-party task (Experiment 1), in which participants created their own objects, Japanese preschoolers but not adults assigned ownership to creators. When participants watched videos of third-party conflicts between owners of materials and creators (Experiment 2), Japanese adults, but not preschoolers, transferred ownership to creators. In a British comparison group, both preschoolers and adults showed an effect of creative labour in the third-party task. A bias to attribute ownership on the basis of creative labour is thus not specific to Western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often assign ownership to the person who has invested labor into making an object (labor rule). However, labor usually improves objects and increases their value, and it has not been investigated whether these considerations underlie people's use of the labor rule. We presented participants with third-party ownership conflicts between an owner of materials and an artist who used the materials for some artwork. Experiment 1 revealed that participants were more likely to transfer ownership to the artist for low-value materials than for high-value materials, and Experiment 2 showed that this effect was further moderated by the amount of effort the artist had invested. A third experiment confirmed that participants transferred ownership more often if the artist's labor had increased the value of the materials than when it had added no value. These findings suggest that considerations for value underlie ownership transfers following the investment of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social network analysis offers new tools to study the social structure of primate groups. We used social network analysis to investigate the cohesiveness of a grooming network in a captive chimpanzee group ( N = 17) and the role that individuals may play in it. Using data from a year-long observation, we constructed an unweighted social network of preferred grooming interactions by retaining only those dyads that groomed above the group mean. This choice of criterion was validated by the finding that the properties of the unweighted network correlated with the properties of a weighted network (i.e. a network representing the frequency of grooming interactions) constructed from the same data. To investigate group cohesion, we tested the resilience of the unweighted grooming network to the removal of central individuals (i.e. individuals with high betweenness centrality). The network fragmented more after the removal of individuals with high betweenness centrality than after the removal of random individuals. Central individuals played a pivotal role in maintaining the network's cohesiveness, and we suggest that this may be a typical property of affiliative networks like grooming networks. We found that the grooming network correlated with kinship and age, and that individuals with higher social status occupied more central positions in the network. Overall, the grooming network showed a heterogeneous structure, yet did not exhibit scale-free properties similar to many other primate networks. We discuss our results in light of recent findings on animal social networks and chimpanzee grooming. Am. J. Primatol. 73:758-767, 2011. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to and control of resources is a major source of costly conflicts. Animals, under some conditions, respect what others control and use (i.e. possession). Humans not only respect possession of resources, they also respect ownership. Ownership can be viewed as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals inhibit their tendency to take others' property on the condition that those others will do the same. We investigated to what degree great apes follow this principle, as compared to human children. We conducted two experiments, in which dyads of individuals could access the same food resources. The main test of respect for ownership was whether individuals would refrain from taking their partner's resources even when the partner could not immediately access and control them. Captive apes (N = 14 dyads) failed to respect their partner's claim on food resources and frequently monopolized the resources when given the opportunity. Human children (N = 14 dyads), tested with a similar apparatus and procedure, respected their partner's claim and made spontaneous verbal references to ownership. Such respect for the property of others highlights the uniquely cooperative nature of human ownership arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]