Development of Joint Action: Planning

Lecturer: Stephen A. Butterfill

When are humans first able to do what Bratman calls ‘interconnected planning’?

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Notes

A Target

We are concerned with an Inconsistent Triad (see What Joint Action Could Not Be):

(1) joint action fosters an understanding of minds;

(2) all joint action involves shared intention; and

(3) a function of shared intention is to coordinate two or more agents’ plans.

Carpenter can be interpreted as responding to the inconsistent triad by endorsing claims (2) and (3). This would force us to reject (1), the conjecture that joint action plays a role in explaining how sophisticated human activities emerge:

‘Despite the common impression that joint action needs to be dumbed down for infants due to their ‘‘lack of a robust theory of mind’’ … all the important social-cognitive building blocks for joint action appear to be in place: 1-year-old infants understand quite a bit about others’ goals and intentions and what knowledge they share with others’ (Carpenter, 2009, p. 383).

Carpenter is explicit in adopting Bratman’s account (see What Is Joint Action? Bratman’s Account):

‘I … adopt Bratman’s (1992) influential formulation of joint action or shared cooperative activity. Bratman argued that in order for an activity to be considered shared or joint each partner needs to intend to perform the joint action together ‘‘in accordance with and because of meshing subplans’’ (p. 338) and this needs to be common knowledge between the participants’ (Carpenter, 2009, p. 381).

Should we accept Carpenter’s view?

What Does Carpenter’s View Predict?

Bratman is explicit that, on his view, ‘shared intentional agency [i.e. ‘joint action’] consists, at bottom, in interconnected planning agency of the participants’ (Bratman, 2011).

The hypothesis that one- and two-year-olds have shared intentions as characterised by Bratman therefore generates a prediction: since a function of shared intention is to coordinate planning, children of this age should be capable, at least in some minimally demanding situations, of coordinating their plans with another’s.

Is the Prediction Correct?

There is good evidence that even 3-year-olds’ abilities to coordinate plans are quite limited. For instance:

‘3- and 5-year-old children do not consider another person’s actions in their own action planning (while showing action planning when acting alone on the apparatus). Seven-year-old children and adults however, demonstrated evidence for joint action planning. … While adult participants demonstrated the presence of joint action planning from the very first trials onward, this was not the case for the 7-year-old children who improved their performance across trials.’ (Paulus, 2016, p. 1059)

And:

‘by age 3 children are able to learn, under certain circumstances, to take account of what a partner is doing in a collaborative problem-solving context. By age 5 they are already quite skillful at attending to and even anticipating a partner’s actions’ (Warneken, Steinwender, Hamann, & Tomasello, 2014, p. 57).

And:

‘proactive planning for two individuals, even when they share a common goal, is more difficult than planning ahead solely for oneself’ (Gerson, Bekkering, & Hunnius, 2016, p. 128).

Conclusion

We are working on the assumption that a function of shared intention is to coordinate two or more agents’ plans (this is claim (3) of the Inconsistent Triad above). Given this assumption, Carpenter’s hypothesis that one- and two-year-old children have shared intentions leads to the prediction that these children can coordinate their plans with others’. At least, they should be able to do so in minimally demanding situations. But in fact it appears that abilities to coordinate plans develop much later, perhaps between five and seven years of age.

References