Lombardi Elisabetta, Di Dio Cinzia, Castelli Ilaria, Massaro Davide, Marchetti Antonella
Department of Psychology, Research Unit on Theory of Mind, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy.
Heliyon. 2017 Jun 18;3(6):e00323. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2017.e00323. eCollection 2017 Jun.
In this study, we seek to widen our understanding of the developmental processes underlying bargaining behaviour in children addressing the concept of prospective thinking. We argue that the emergence of the capacity to think prospectively about future outcomes or behaviours in response to current actions is a required precedent to strategic decision making. To test this idea, we compared 6, 8 and 10 years old children's performance on three tasks: the ultimatum game assessing fairness/inequality aversion, the marshmallow task, an intertemporal choice task evaluating the ability to delay gratification, and the dictator game assessing altruism. The children's socio-demographic and cognitive variables were also evaluated. We hypothesized that development of strategic thinking in the ultimatum game is related to an increased ability to delay gratification - given that both tasks require looking at prospective benefits - and, crucially, not to altruism, which benefits from immediate selfless reward. Our results confirmed our hypothesis suggesting that increased strategic planning with age would also stem from the development of competencies like prospective thinking.
在本研究中，我们试图拓宽对儿童讨价还价行为背后发展过程的理解，探讨前瞻性思维的概念。我们认为，针对当前行动对未来结果或行为进行前瞻性思考的能力的出现，是战略决策的必要前提。为了验证这一观点，我们比较了6岁、8岁和10岁儿童在三项任务中的表现：评估公平/不平等厌恶的最后通牒博弈、评估延迟满足能力的跨期选择任务棉花糖任务，以及评估利他主义的独裁者博弈。我们还评估了儿童的社会人口统计学和认知变量。我们假设，最后通牒博弈中战略思维的发展与延迟满足能力的提高有关——因为这两项任务都需要考虑预期收益——而且至关重要的是，与利他主义无关，利他主义受益于即时的无私回报。我们的结果证实了我们的假设，表明随着年龄增长，战略规划能力的提高也源于前瞻性思维等能力的发展。
