Meeting and missing minds: children and adults use alignment of intuitions to solve pure coordination games

In pure coordination games, players seek to coordinate responses with one another without communicating. Without a logically correct response, success depends upon players intuiting a response that is mutually obvious. Previous work suggests that such coordination requires a distinctive form of thinking and sufficient mutual knowledge, but reveals little about the basis for the intuitive judgements themselves. Here, that question was addressed by examining the basis of coordination performance of groups whose intuitions might plausibly differ: children versus adults. In an initial and pre-registered study, two groups of children (4- to 5-year-olds, and 6- to 7-year-olds) and adults undertook four types of coordination game, and novel metrics allowed “intuitive alignment” in responses to be evaluated within- and between-groups. All groups performed above chance, and adults showed higher levels of alignment than children, but adults and children showed different patterns in their intuitions. Implications for intergenerational understanding and mis-understanding are discussed.