Cross-Cultural Comparison of Peer Influence on Discovery Rate during Play

Previous literature has explored how factors such as maturation, attachment style, and security influence children’s freeplay behavior. The present study investigates a previously unexplored factor: peer presence. This is an important consideration because much of children’s play and early learning occurs in a social context with siblings and friends. We tested children (ages 2 to 11) from two different cultural environments: the lowlands of Bolivia, the home of a group of Amazonian farmer-foragers called the Tsimane’ (Experiment 1), and the United States (Experiment 2). We presented groups of children from both cultures with a set of toys hidden in envelopes to explore and discover either with a familiar peer or without. Tsimane’ children discovered significantly more objects in the presence of a peer, over and above the effect that would be expected from simply having two children search the toys independently in parallel. Additionally, Tsimane’ children discovered more objects as a function of age. The United States children did not exhibit the same pattern of behavior. Peer presence facilitated exploration in younger children but inhibited exploration in older children, relative to exploration rate without the peer. Taken together, peer presence facilitates exploration among young children across both cultures. However, among older U.S. children, peer presence inhibited exploration. We propose that the positive effect of peer presence on discovery rate may be driven by an increase in competition for resource control. The differences among older children across cultures may be an artifact due to experience with formal schooling.