Let's play, but seriously: Joint commitment in children's pretend play

Social pretend play offers a unique window into the early manifestation of commitment in development. When engaged in social pretend play, children actively cooperate to create a shared fictional world and hold normative expectations about how each participant should behave within it. Yet, previous research has been cautious in characterizing the nature of the commitments at stake in pretend play. In this article, we offer a fine-grained conceptual analysis of joint commitments in pretend play. Drawing on Bangerter et al.’s (2022) proposal to investigate joint commitment as a product and as a process, we identify several facets of pretend play that involve distinct forms of joint commitments and discuss how these may be established even in the absence of explicit linguistic expressions of agreement. We also highlight relevant gaps in the current experimental work on joint commitment in pretend play and their implications for future research.