Fondazione Collegio Pio X

Defeat Means Friendship: Does Competitive Play Prepare Children for Cooperation?

This work-in-progress quasi-experimental study asks whether the order in which children encounter competitive and cooperative board games affects their social-emotional learning.

• The study examines whether playing competitive versus cooperative board games in a set order affects social-emotional learning in 86 seven- to eight-year-olds across four second-grade classes in an Italian primary school, with eight monthly sessions from October 2025 to May 2026.
• In preliminary analysis of 12 sessions and 289 coded behaviours, positively coded behaviours made up 55% of cooperative sessions versus 28% of competitive ones, a contrast the authors attribute to what each game format elicits rather than to children's social competence.
• The core hypothesis is that competitive play may build regulatory skills such as frustration management and tolerance of adversarial moves that later support cooperation, but this sequencing effect remains untested until the final data phase.