Forced “social” responses and preference changes between individual and social contingencies in children and adults

Abstract

We designed four experiements to evaluate whether forced responses in a peer´s task would change individual preferences between individual and social contingencies. Dyads of children and dyads of adults participated in situations of partial altruism, total altruism, and competition. The experimental task consisted in completing puzzles presented on the screens of two synchronized computers. The dyads were exposed to two types of training that alternated (a) conditions with choices between social and individual contingencies and (b) conditions that forced the participants to respond in the peer´s puzzle. In four experiments, half of the dyads solved the task with both subjects in the same room; in the other half of the dyads each participant worked in a separate room. The results suggest that exposure to forced-response conditions produce different efferent, depending on the type of contingency shared during the choice conditions.