Examining preschoolers’ social-cognitive skills and persuasion styles in a novel persuasion task

Building persuasion skills in early childhood may positively impact leadership development later in life. Yet, empirical research on how persuasion can be assessed in early childhood and what factors predict it remains limited. This study presented a paradigm for assessing persuasion skills in young children, using a negotiation task involving control of a high-value resource. Additionally, the current study examined whether persuasion styles are predicted by children's cognitive and emotion abilities. Seventy-three 3- to 6-year-old Singaporean preschoolers participated in the persuasion task. Children also completed a series of tasks measuring executive function, language, theory of mind, and emotion knowledge skills. Four persuasion styles were identified based on the strategies children used during the task: rationalizing, passive, deceptive, and authoritarian. Theory of mind skills were positively associated with rationalizing persuasion style, and short-term memory was negatively associated with the deceptive persuasion style. Results from hierarchical regression analyses showed that after controlling for children's age, socioeconomic status, reading ability, and short-term memory, preschoolers’ emotion recognition skill was a significant predictor of the deceptive persuasion style, and appearance-reality and false-belief scores were significant predictors of the authoritarian persuasion style. These findings provide a novel framework for assessing early childhood persuasion skills and highlight the foundational role of early social-cognitive abilities in shaping distinct persuasion styles.