Increasingly Coordinated: Propensity for Cooperation and Aversion to Competition in Children, Adolescents and Young Adults

Adolescence is an age of social re-orientation during which developing socio-cognitive skills allow people to better coordinate their behavior to their social environment, such as to different interaction partners. Little is known, however, about the development of coordination abilities in different strategic environments during this age. To fill this gap, we used game theoretic paradigms to investigate if, during adolescence, people improve in their ability to distinguish between cooperative and competitive environments. N= 596 participants between the ages of 9 and 48, of which 150 children (9–11-year-olds), 147 adolescents (12-15) and 299 adults (18-48), coordinated their choices with an anonymous peer without communicating and without feedback from previous outcomes, thus based only on the commonly visible incentives. Each game involved a series of choices between two options: a low-paying but sure option (e.g., 4 coins), and a potentially high-paying but uncertain option (15 coins or 0). In a cooperative condition, the maximum payoff of 15 was obtained if both players chose the uncertain option; conversely, in the competitive condition, the maximum payoff was obtained only if one player chose the uncertain option and the other did not, and if both players chose the uncertain option both obtained nothing. Finally, in a non-social control condition, the unsure payoff was obtained based on a random lottery draw. Participants of all ages chose the uncertain option more frequently in the cooperative environment relative to competitive one, and this propensity for cooperation increased during adolescence. Adults also showed greater choice variability and longer response times in the competitive condition relative to the cooperative condition. This aversion to competition was not observed in children and was only partly observed in adolescents. Age-related differences in aversion to competition but not propensity for cooperation, were partly explained by age-related improvements in non-verbal reasoning. These findings demonstrate that coordination abilities improve during adolescence and that this is determined by an adolescent developing propensity for cooperation and an adolescent emergent aversion to competition.