19
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Prospective thinking and decision making in primary school age children

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          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.

          Related collections

          Most cited references62

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees.

            Human beings routinely help others to achieve their goals, even when the helper receives no immediate benefit and the person helped is a stranger. Such altruistic behaviors (toward non-kin) are extremely rare evolutionarily, with some theorists even proposing that they are uniquely human. Here we show that human children as young as 18 months of age (prelinguistic or just-linguistic) quite readily help others to achieve their goals in a variety of different situations. This requires both an understanding of others' goals and an altruistic motivation to help. In addition, we demonstrate similar though less robust skills and motivations in three young chimpanzees.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              A Meta-Analysis of the Convergent Validity of Self-Control Measures.

              There is extraordinary diversity in how the construct of self-control is operationalized in research studies. We meta-analytically examined evidence of convergent validity among executive function, delay of gratification, and self- and informant-report questionnaire measures of self-control. Overall, measures demonstrated moderate convergence (r(random) = .27 [95% CI = .24, .30]; r(fixed) = .34 [.33, .35], k = 282 samples, N = 33,564 participants), although there was substantial heterogeneity in the observed correlations. Correlations within and across types of self-control measures were strongest for informant-report questionnaires and weakest for executive function tasks. Questionnaires assessing sensation seeking impulses could be distinguished from questionnaires assessing processes of impulse regulation. We conclude that self-control is a coherent but multidimensional construct best assessed using multiple methods.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Heliyon
                Heliyon
                Heliyon
                Elsevier
                2405-8440
                18 June 2017
                June 2017
                18 June 2017
                : 3
                : 6
                : e00323
                Affiliations
                [a ]Department of Psychology, Research Unit on Theory of Mind, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy
                [b ]Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author. elisabetta.lombardi@ 123456unicatt.it
                Article
                S2405-8440(16)31819-9 e00323
                10.1016/j.heliyon.2017.e00323
                5477063
                918f7eeb-8952-4857-92e4-e9ab3816c521
                © 2017 The Authors

                This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

                History
                : 18 October 2016
                : 7 April 2017
                : 7 June 2017
                Categories
                Article

                psychology,education
                psychology, education

                Comments

                Comment on this article