Melissa Perring 1, Sotaro Kita 1, John Michael 2, Barbora Siposova 1 1 Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, U.K. 2 Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Hungary
When adults coordinate together in a task, they seem more committed and more likely to complete the task together. But can an adult coordinating with a young child increase the child’s sense of commitment within a joint activity? This study investigated whether coordination in a joint activity – with or without ostensive cues – elicited commitment-related behaviour: persistence and acknowledgement behaviour. In a between-subjects design with three conditions (N=72), we compared 4-year-olds responses when their adult play partner used: A) low coordination; B) high coordination; or C) high coordination with ostensive cues. Results failed to support the ‘coordination creates commitment’ hypothesis: children were no more persistent in the high coordination with ostensive cues condition, than the low coordination condition, and were, surprisingly, less likely to show acknowledgement behaviours on leaving. Rather than inferring that high coordination with ostensive cues reduced children’s commitment, we provide a new interpretation of earlier findings. Firstly, we reinterpret “acknowledgment behaviours” to indicate that children were seeking rather than giving information – i.e., they were not acknowledging leaving the main game but were checking with their joint activity partner to see whether it was okay to leave. Secondly, we conclude that high coordination with ostensive cues served to disambiguate the conflict situation for the child by bringing them closer to the experimenter and the experimenter’s thoughts. This enabled them to better predict the experimenter’s response to them leaving the game and made the need for checking less likely.
