Help-Seeking As A Cause of Young Children’s Collaboration

Help-Seeking As A Cause of Young Children’s Collaboration Christopher Vredenburgh (cv92@cornell.edu) Department of Human Development, Cornell University Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA Tamar Kushnir (tk397@cornell.edu) Department of Human Development, Cornell University Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA Abstract Young children’s collaboration is a topic of great interest, yet what causes children to initiate collaboration in some circumstances but not others is unclear. In this research, we analyzed preschoolers’ collaboration as an information gathering activity in a toy assembly activity. We independently assessed children’s competency at a similar building task and, using a separate group of children, the difficulty of each step of the activity. We hypothesized that children would request collaborative assistance when they needed assistance (that is, when they were less competent and/or the task was more difficult), but act independently when capable. The results confirmed that preschoolers were more likely to request collaborative assistance as the difficulty of the activity increased and more so if they were initially less competent. The results suggest that preschoolers’ collaboration may be profitably viewed as an information gathering activity. Keywords: Collaboration; help-seeking; social learning; preschool children; play. Introduction Recently, there has been considerable interest in children’s early-emerging social learning abilities, including their reliance on social information (Koenig & Harris, 2005) and their propensity to learn through collaboration (Duran & Gauvain, 1993; Foley, Ratner, & House, 2002; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009; Sommerville & Hammond, 2007). Indeed, it has even been argued that these social learning abilities, in particular collaboration and the psychological motivations underlying collaboration, are what distinguish humans from nonhuman primates (Tomasello, Call, Behne, & Moll, Recent research on children’s collaboration has emphasized the importance of children’s tendency to appreciate joint goals and commitment to collaborators. This research has demonstrated that children collaborate even when doing so does not gain them any explicit benefits (Warneken, Grafenhain, & Tomasello, 2012). Nonetheless, what causes children to initiate collaboration is still widely debated. Researchers have proposed a range of factors that highlight complementary processes that are generally consistent with one another (Tomasello et al 2005). The range of suggested factors includes a general motivation to share cognitive states with others, a “curiosity” to understand psychological and physical causes, and a social game theoretic distinctively rewarding to humans (Tomasello et al, 2005). These possible causes are clearly not mutually exclusive. Moreover, many of them make a similar prediction: when children are offered the opportunity to involve others in tasks, they will do so regardless of whether they need help at all. Intriguingly, research on people’s help-seeking could shed light on why children collaborate in some circumstances, but not all. Specifically, help-seeking involves a help seeker signaling to a helper a desire for them to assist in attaining a goal. Help-seeking often occurs when an individual is not confident in their ability to independently complete the task (Nelson-Le Gall et al, 1990). Interestingly, requests for assistance can result in a range of collaborative exchanges of information and action. For instance, responses can vary from indirect verbal hints that facilitate the help seeker to direct coordination of actions between the help seeker and helper. Indeed, help seekers often prefer to avoid receiving too much help, so as to remain actively involved (Nelson-Le Gall, 1986). Thus, help-seeking generally occurs in relation to uncertainty about independently carrying out the task, and can lead to a variety of collaborative exchanges of information and action. In this research, we examined children’s help- seeking as a proximate cause of collaboration that may contribute to children’s learning. From this perspective, children face information gathering trade-offs in acting alone versus collaborating. Relatedly, empirical studies show that children often prefer to play on their own, and indeed there are learning benefits to such autonomous exploration (Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007). Children at times learn more from acting than from watching someone else perform an action (Berry, 1991; Sommerville, Hildebrand & Crane, 2008; Kushnir, Wellman, & Gelman, 2009). However, when a child is cognitively or motorically unable to perform an activity, they gain little or no information by acting. Therefore, in this case the child may seek assistance instead of struggling alone. We hypothesized that, rather than always involving others in their play, children will be more likely to request collaborative assistance only when they need assistance. More specifically, we ask whether the difficulty of the activity and the competence of the individual child will predict changes in the frequency and nature of their collaborative interactions. The empirical investigation of our hypotheses required permitting children to choose to act independently