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Research Colloquium Talk by Dr. Sebastian Grüneisen (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)



On Friday, February 01, 2019, a new Research Colloquium takes place at the LFE. Dr. Sebastian Grüneisen (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) will give a lecture.

The talk is entitled: The role of social interdependence in children’s cooperative decision-making

Abstract:
Cooperation enables people to achieve things they could not achieve alone. However, cooperation is inherently risky since by participating we make ourselves dependent on the cooperative acts of others. The last decades have seen a surge of investigations into the psychological mechanisms that help people overcome these risks. A central proposition that has arisen from this research is that social interdependence may be an important evolutionary and proximate source of expectations and motivations that contribute to human cooperative success (Robert, 2005; Tomasello et al., 2012; Sterelny, 2012). In this talk, I will present research that addresses this issue from a developmental perspective by examining the role of social interdependence in children’s cooperative decision making. Our findings suggest that by at least age 7 children hold expectations that interactions marked by social interdependence will be mutually beneficial and this facilitates their ability to coordinate decisions with one another. In a second study, we presented German and Kenyan 5- to 6-year-old children with a cooperative version of the famous marshmallow test in order to explore whether social interdependence affects children’s motivation to invest effort in cooperative activities. Together, these studies provide new insights into the role of social interdependence in shaping human cooperative psychology.

When? Friday, January 11, 2019 | 11 am – 1 pm

Where? Leipzig University, Marschnerstraße 31, House 3, Room 301 („Turmzimmer”), D-04109 Leipzig