The Pizzagame: A virtual public goods game to assess cooperative behavior in children and adolescents.
Social dilemmas are characterized by conflicts between immediate self-interest and long-term collective goals. Although such conflicts lie at the heart of various challenging social interactions, we know little about how cooperation in these situations develops. To extend work on social dilemmas to child and adolescent samples, we developed an age-appropriate computer task (the Pizzagame) with the structural features of a public goods game (PGG). We administered the Pizzagame to a sample of 191 children 9 to 16 years of age. Subjects were led to believe they were playing the game over the Internet with three sets of two same-aged, same-sex co-players. In fact, the co-players were computer-generated and programmed to expose children to three consecutive conditions: (1) a cooperative strategy, (2) a selfish strategy, and (3) divergent cooperative-selfish strategies. Supporting the validity of the Pizzagame, our results revealed that children and adolescents displayed conditional cooperation, such that their contributions rose with the increasing cooperativeness of their co-players. Age and gender did not influence children and adolescents' cooperative behavior within each condition. However, older children adapted their behavior more flexibly between conditions to parallel the strategies of their co-players. These results support the utility of the Pizzagame as a feasible, reliable, and valid instrument for assessing and quantifying child and adolescent cooperative behavior. Moreover, these findings extend previous work showing that age influences cooperative behavior in the PGG.
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University of Leipzig, Liebigstraße 20a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany. jan.keil@medizin.uni-leipzig.de.
Jan
J
Keil
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University of Leipzig, Liebigstraße 20a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.|Department of Developmental Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Jena, Germany.
Andrea
A
Michel
Department of Empirical Educational Research, University of Konstanz/Thurgau University of Teacher Education, Konstanz, Germany.
Fabio
F
Sticca
Faculty of Business and Economics, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany.
Kristina
K
Leipold
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University of Leipzig, Liebigstraße 20a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
Annette M
AM
Klein
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University of Leipzig, Liebigstraße 20a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
Susan
S
Sierau
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University of Leipzig, Liebigstraße 20a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
Kai
K
von Klitzing
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University of Leipzig, Liebigstraße 20a, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
Lars O
LO
White
D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D012737:Sex Factors; D012919:Social Behavior; D014584:User-Computer Interface
Child development; Computerized task; Cooperation; Prosocial behavior; Public goods game