Healthy social interactions are critical for children’s development and academic and life success. Relevant research is found in two key disciplines with different emphases: Developmental psychology focuses on individual thoughts, motivations and traits; and behavioral economics and game theory focuses on behavioral tasks. This project integrated these approaches by validating a game-theoretic task for children, the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD), and demonstrated how it can be used to elucidate the mechanisms underlying children’s social interactions.
I developed a novel RPD with fixed-strategy partners in order to test specific hypotheses based on developmental theories of social interaction. Children between 9 and 11 years of age (N = 167) were tested on the RPD followed by questions about how they played and interpreted the task. Parents completed a questionnaire assessing their child’s reactive and proactive aggressive traits, a basis for predicting decisions in the RPD. Children also completed a Social Information Processing (SIP) task with novel positive scenarios in addition to standard negative ones.
I hypothesized that: 1) children would interpret the RPD as a real social interaction and engage in strategic forms of play according to game theory; 2) children with different levels of reactive and proactive aggression would show different patterns of RPD play based on theories of aggression; 3) the SIP responses would predict different levels of cooperation in the RPD, and the positive scenarios would generate responses consistent with the general SIP theory.
Results showed support for the first hypothesis with classes of motivations (interpersonal and strategic self-interest) predicting RPD behavior. The second hypothesis was partially confirmed: Children rated high on reactive aggression showed reactive responses in the RPD. This analysis also revealed an important novel finding that high-reactive children followed a game-theoretic strategy known as “Grim” – they did not return to cooperation after partner defection. The third hypothesis was partially confirmed: Responses for the positive scenarios were consistent with the SIP model but did not predict RPD play.
These findings demonstrate the value of integrating theoretical and methodological approaches from developmental psychology and game theory in order to study the mechanisms of social interaction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/33085 |
| Date | 07 November 2018 |
| Creators | Chita-Tegmark, Mihaela |
| Contributors | Blake, Peter |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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