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Category: Project

Description: Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self-serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third-party collaborative task did 5-year-olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate an early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self-serving bias.