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Key points
- A newly published study in Psychological Science studied negotiation skills in children from ages 4 to 9.
- The study aimed to see if there were any gender differences that showed up in children's negotiations.
- The study found important gender differences, and the authors have offered practical recommendations to address them.
Research suggests that women tend to negotiate differently than men, and this becomes more pronounced when the other party to the negotiation is made up of men. For instance, women tend to request less money in negotiations and also carry them out less frequently in the first place.
One question that has received almost no attention, however, is the age at which these differences start to emerge in development. In particular, do children show gender differences in negotiations, and if so, when do they start to emerge?
A newly published paper in Psychological Science may begin to shed some light on this important question. The researchers, Sophie Arnold at New York University and Katherine McAuliffe at Boston College, studied children from ages 4 to 9 to see if there were any gender differences that showed up in their negotiations. There were indeed.
In their study, children had the chance to negotiate for stickers. They first performed a series of tasks that were unrelated to the rest of the study. Then a person in charge (the evaluator) would commend them for their work on the tasks, and offer stickers as a prize. For some of the children, this evaluator was male, and for other children female. That will turn out to matter below.
The evaluator would then ask the child: “How many stickers do you think you should get for completing the game you just played?” No limits were placed on the number here.
If the child asked for two or fewer stickers, that request was accepted and the study was over. However, if the child asked for three or more stickers, then there would be another round of negotiation. At this point, the evaluator would say that the requested number of stickers was too high and that he or she could not give out any more stickers than was allowed. At this second round, if the child then asked for two or fewer stickers, that request was accepted and the study was over.
But if the child asked for three or more stickers in the second round, there would be one final round. The evaluator would decline this request from the child, and finally, clarify that the number of stickers he or she was allowed to give out had to be lower than three. The child would make one final request, and then the study would be over.
To illustrate in the case where a child went all three rounds, here is one possible scenario:
“How many stickers do you think you should get for completing the game you just played?”
“8”
[Declined]
“4”
[Declined]
“2”
[Accepted]
Arnold and McAuliffe ran their study with children in three different age groups: 4 to 5, 6 to 7, and 8 to 9. This last group is where the most interesting results emerged, which will be reported below.
One set of results had to do with the average number of stickers requested per child, and whether that was affected by whether the evaluator was male or female. For boys, it did not matter much. They requested an average of 4 stickers when the evaluator was male, and 4.75 stickers when the evaluator was female.
Things were significantly different for the girls at ages 8 to 9. When the evaluator was female, their requests were in line with the boys: 4.85 stickers. But when the evaluator was male, the average request dropped all the way to 2.75.
Another set of results had to do with persistence. For how many trials would the child ask for more than two stickers? Across the different age ranges, boys were fairly consistent in how long they would ask for a large prize. The same was true for girls when the evaluator was female. The one exception was that as age went up, persistence tended to go down for girls when the evaluator was male.
Arnold and McAuliffe note two possibilities for explaining these results. One has to do with status. Perhaps by age 8 to 9, girls will tend to regard themselves as of lower status with regard to a male but not a female authority figure. Another potential explanation involves stereotypes. Perhaps by this age, girls have started to internalize negative stereotypes about intelligence and ability that lead to them being less willing to make requests of others. These two explanations could even both be partially true.
What can be done practically to address these results? According to Arnold and McAuliffe: Girls need to think concretely about their goals before embarking on a negotiation, and whether the other person's goals interfere with their own. Also, parents should also be aware of how they treat their boys and girls, and negotiation training can even begin as early as elementary school.
This makes sense, but we also need a lot more preliminary research, too. Note that the Psychological Science study had a small participant number. For the 7- to 8-year-olds, for instance, there were 20 girls in the female evaluator group and 20 girls in the male evaluator group. What would larger participant numbers find? The participants also were all in the Boston area. What results would emerge in other locations? Also worth noting is that the male and female evaluators were the same individuals for every single child. It is possible that there were some idiosyncratic features of the male evaluator in particular. And finally, what about other rewards besides stickers. Do the results generalize there as well?
As with so many findings in psychology, a lot more research is needed before we should move to training and education reform. But Arnold and McAuliffe have carried out a fascinating study that will hopefully inspire much more work in this area.
References
An earlier version of this article appeared in Forbes here.
