Question of Trust" (Mildenhall-Dixon-Berg, 1987; Dixon, Dixon, & Berg, 1988; Dixon, Dixon, & Berg, 1988a). The authors observed that trust in others was more important for the older students. The older students in the groups were trusted more by their peers. Older participants experienced less stress in social interactions and were in a stronger position when negotiating a compromise with their partners. Age also had a positive effect on the development of cooperation in the sense that the older participants did not perceive a need to monitor their actions as strongly and had less difficulty to "let go" of control. In contrast to these results, a similar experiment using the same paradigm in groups of preschool children did not show an advantage of older over younger children with respect to being trusted (Dixon, Dixon, & Berg, 1988b). However, in this research, younger children were better than their peers at resolving conflicts. They perceived less interference and were more able to maintain cooperation without the help of punishment. These results are not easily understood. To explain this finding, it should be taken into consideration that socialization in the area of emotion regulation starts very early (Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 2004; Grossmann, Tomasello, & Cohen, 2012). There is a strong interplay between perception, expression, and experience of emotions in family relationships and in the first years in social relationships. The behavior of peers is shaped by the parenting style of their parents, their own affective reactivity to frustration, and the extent of their exposure to the emotions of their parents. On a behavioral level, this means that children learn from an early age how others perceive them and how they influence them. It takes some time until the child can learn to use these experiences in a way that the child can use others to regulate his or her own emotions and behavior. This learning process is dependent on the parenting style of parents, their own affective reactivity to frustration, and the extent of their exposure to the emotions of their peers. Hence, this learning process is not just due to age, but is dependent on several other factors. It would be interesting to know if the older children of the first study (Dixon, Dixon, & Berg, 1988a) had a particular parenting style and higher exposure to peer behavior and emotion regulation than the younger ones. A further finding in the Dixon et al. (1988) studies is that with increasing age, the children became more successful at social problem-solving. If an older child does not get what he or she wants from another child in a social setting, this child has at his or her disposal a number of behaviors that allow him or her to cope with the peer. For example, the child can talk to him- or herself out loud, can show aggressive behavior or play a silent game. The social problem-solving behavior of the older children seemed to be more flexible. Sometimes older children played in a more cooperative way with each other and sometimes in an aggressive way, depending on the context. This ability of flexibility may indicate that the older children are better equipped to deal with the social environment. The question that we have to answer, as a result of the research on problem-solving strategies in the groups, is how this may influence cooperation and conflict resolution. It is possible that older children are more successful in dealing with social problems because they have the required strategies. We know that older children are better at cognitive problem-solving, whereas younger children rely more on strategies for dealing with the social problem (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). A further question concerns the ability of older children to detect that their own solutions may interfere with the needs of others. That is, they have a clear understanding of what behavior is appropriate to the situation. The older children might not feel the need to monitor their own actions as much as younger children do. Dixon and colleagues (1988a) argue that the results are not due to a lack of understanding of the social context or cognitive abilities. There is a difference between understanding the social context and knowing how to deal with it, and there may be a difference between being able to understand a social setting and to actively regulate one's behavior in it. The older children are better at coping with the social situation, so the ability to detect the emotion of others is more important than a precise ability to reason in their own social setting. In the light of these findings, we would expect that the group of older participants in our studies would be better at avoiding conflicts and that this would also have an effect on their moral evaluations of the group behavior. An example for this would be to compare group judgments of the moral content of the actions by two 12-year-old children with those of a group of 15-year-olds. In this example, we would predict that the 12-year-olds would be better than the 15-year-olds at deciding what to do when the outcome was the same for all parties, but the method that would help someone achieve this goal would be unacceptable to others. For example, one child had a need to play music in her bedroom, and the other child did not, so the first child found some tools and drilled a hole in the wall to get some acoustics and privacy. There is no question that this is more or less acceptable. However, if the child who had no need for acoustics was happy to get the benefit of the other person's drilling, we would expect the 12-year-olds to rate this behavior as more moral than the 15-year-olds. On the other hand, in a situation where the conflict of interest was clear and the goal was unclear, like in the previous examples, it is possible that a more mature understanding of the social context would not lead to differences between the groups, as one would expect older participants to have such an understanding already. Hence, older children should be able to take the perspective of others, and this should reduce a possible bias. This was studied in a study of decision making in groups of different ages, where the perspective taking of group members was not relevant for the decisions made by the group. Mischel and Shoda (1995) developed an experimental paradigm for studying social learning and social problem-solving in five-year-old children. The experiment consisted of a series of six decisions, and each choice was the result of a problem-solving strategy. For example, the children were confronted with the situation that they had to decide between taking a treat from another child and a treat from themselves. One of the children was punished if she took the treat from the other child. If the child was punished, it would not be available to her any longer. The children also made choices that affected themselves. If they gave the treat from themselves to the other child, they would receive one. A treat that they were given to them was an unwanted treat, and so they had to do something unpleasant in order to get it. The children also received a treat from their own self-serving behavior. Hence, there were situations in which the child could decide either to punish the other child or to take the treat from herself. Finally, the children could make the decision to get the treat from the other child without having punished her. The different options were presented in a three-stage procedure. By comparing the results of decisions in the younger and older groups, Mischel and Shoda (1995) studied the effect of cognitive development on decisions made by children. In the younger group, the children were less likely to punish or reward themselves for their behavior than the older children. Thus, children seem to be better at regulating their behavior when their cognitive ability enables them to anticipate possible consequences. In addition to this self-regulatory tendency in the young children, the authors found no group differences in punishment and reward in choices between punishments and rewards for other children. This means that both younger and older children were similar in their tendency to share with others. On the basis of the results of this experiment, Mischel and Shoda (1995) made two important points. First, their results are related to a developmental change in decisions involving punishment. According to Piaget's (1967) theory of cognitive development, we expect an increase in planning and consideration of alternative strategies to be more important with increasing age. The authors note that in later childhood, altruistic behavior and generosity are also important in the development of social relationships. They conclude that older children can make more accurate decisions because they have considered different possibilities before making their decision, whereas the younger children make their decision in the face of a given situation. That is, younger children rely on their perception of others to make decisions, and therefore the choices are more likely to be based on a certain understanding of the circumstances. It is possible that the younger children base their behavior on the behavior of the other children, whereas older children learn by integrating their own experience and knowledge to find an answer that fits the problem. The second point that Mischel and Shoda make is that the results of their study can also be related to developmental changes in empathy. Empathy is understood as the ability to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others (Batson, 1998). Although younger children may understand more easily how to make decisions in the face of a problem, this does not mean that they have an empathic response that leads them to be concerned for the other children in similar situations. The results of the study suggest that young children have an empathic response to the problem-solving strategies of others and the different intentions to take action toward a certain goal. In this respect, the older children have learned to anticipate and integrate the reactions of others in the decision-