Exploring Sibling Cooperation Across Cultures: Indigenous Yurakaré and Polish Urban Children

Children develop cooperative behaviours within culturally specific social environments from an early age. This exploratory study analysed cooperation between siblings in two different cultural contexts: Yurakaré Indigenous community in Bolivia (N = 22; M_age = 5.31 years; 59.1% female) and urban Poland (N = 24; M_age = 4.86 years; 45.8% female). Mixed-age sibling dyads participated in a tower-building task designed to evaluate cooperative behaviours, focusing on verbal communication, attention management, and cooperation dynamics. Yurakaré siblings more often engaged in complementary actions and jointly built tower levels, whereas Polish siblings tended to construct levels individually and used approximately three times more verbal communication. The groups also differed in their attention management characteristics. Across both groups, fewer attentional shifts during the task were associated with older age. Although the sample size is small, this study provides novel insights into culture-specific cooperation and proposes new research procedures and hypotheses for future investigation.