Koomen Rebecca, Waddington Owen, Goncalves Leonor Santana Miranda, Köymen Bahar, Jensen Keith
School of Collective Intelligence, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Ben Guerir, Morocco.
Division of Psychology, Communication and Human Neuroscience, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 May 7;12(5):250392. doi: 10.1098/rsos.250392. eCollection 2025.
For cooperation to succeed, individuals must often 'delay gratification' and forego an immediate reward for a larger delayed reward that is co-produced through the cooperative act. This experiment asked whether a promise to wait increased children's propensity to coordinate with their partner by waiting to eat their own treat. In this first cooperative marshmallow test conducted online, 5- to 6-year-old UK-based children ( = 66) interacted from their homes via video call with a confederate child who either promised not to eat his treat (promise condition) or expressed the possibility that he might eat his treat (social risk condition). Across the full dataset and a reduced dataset in which participants were not accidentally interrupted during the task ( = 48), children in the promise condition waited longer to eat their treat than children in the social risk condition. Younger children, but not older children, also successfully delayed gratification more often in the promise condition than in the social risk condition. Thus, even when communication is one-sided in an interdependent marshmallow task, explicit promises can support children's motivation to delay gratification relative to explicit uncertainty.
为了使合作取得成功，个体通常必须“延迟满足”，放弃即时奖励，以换取通过合作行为共同产生的更大的延迟奖励。本实验探讨了等待的承诺是否会增加儿童与伙伴合作等待吃自己那份零食的倾向。在这项首次在线进行的合作棉花糖测试中，66名5至6岁的英国儿童在家中通过视频通话与一名同盟儿童互动，该同盟儿童要么承诺不吃自己的零食（承诺条件），要么表示有可能吃自己的零食（社会风险条件）。在完整数据集以及任务过程中未被意外打断的精简数据集（48名参与者）中，承诺条件下的儿童比社会风险条件下的儿童等待吃零食的时间更长。在承诺条件下，年幼儿童（而非年长儿童）也比在社会风险条件下更频繁地成功延迟满足。因此，即使在相互依赖的棉花糖任务中沟通是单向的，相对于明确的不确定性，明确的承诺也能支持儿童延迟满足的动机。
