3- and 5-year-old children’s adherence to explicit and implicit joint commitments.

The problem with collaboration is that there are temptations to defect. Explicit joint commitments are designed to mitigate some of the risks, but people also feel committed to others implicitly when they both know together that they each hold the other's fate in their hands. In the current study, pairs of 3-year-old and 5-year-old children (N = 192) played a collaborative game. One child was offered individual rewards (bribed) to opt out of the...