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Best Friends’ Discussions of Social Dilemmas

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

Peer relationships, particularly friendships, have been theorized to contribute to how children and adolescents think about social and moral issues. The current study examined how young adolescent best friends (191 dyads; 53.4 % female) reason together about multifaceted social dilemmas and how their reasoning is related to friendship quality. Mutually-recognized friendship dyads were videotaped discussing dilemmas entailing moral, social-conventional and prudential/pragmatic issues. Both dyad members completed a self-report measure of friendship quality. Dyadic data analyses guided by the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model indicated that adolescent and friend reports of friendship qualities were related to the forms of reasoning used during discussion. Friends who both reported that they could resolve conflicts in a constructive way were more likely to use moral reasoning than friends who reported that their conflict resolution was poor or disagreed on the quality of their conflict resolution. The findings provide evidence for the important role that friendship interaction may play in adolescents’ social and moral development.

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Notes

  1. Dyads with one member being either high on withdrawn behavior (top 33 % on withdrawal and bottom 50 % on aggression), high on aggressive behavior (top 33 % on aggression and bottom 50 % on withdrawal), or low on both behaviors (bottom 50 % on withdrawal and aggression) were specifically targeted for participation in the laboratory portion of the study. Analyses indicated that individuals who came to the university-based laboratory did not differ from those who did not participate in the laboratory portion on indices of peer-nominated aggressive [t (1, 1459) = −.64, p = .52] or withdrawn behavior [t (1, 1459) = −1.59, p = .11] nor did the sample’s aggressive [t (377) = .49, p = .62] or withdrawn behavior [t (377) = 1.34, p = . 18] significantly differ from zero.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Linda Finkel and Michael Schlessinger for help with coding and transcriptions. The authors would also like to thank the children, parents, and teachers who participated in the study, as well as Julie Bowker, Allison Buskirk-Cohen, Angela Chiang, Ebony Dashiell-Aje, Kathleen Dwyer, Erin Galloway, Jon Goldner, Sue Hartman, Amy Kennedy Root, Angel Kim, Sarrit Kovacs, Melissa Menzer, Alison Levitch, Abby Moorman, Wonjung Oh, Andre Peri, Margro Purple, Joshua Rubin, Erin Shockey, and Alissa Wigdor who assisted in data collection and input. The research reported in this manuscript was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grant # MH58116 to Kenneth H. Rubin. Kristina L. McDonald was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland with Kenneth Rubin during the formulation of this study.

Author Contributions

K.M. conceived of the study, participated in the design, performed the statistical analyses, interpreted findings, and drafted the manuscript; T.M. conceived of the study, participated in the design, led data coding, and helped to draft the manuscript; M.K. participated in the design, interpreted findings, and helped to draft the manuscript; K.R. conceived of the larger study, participated in design and data collection, interpreted findings, and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Alabama, Box 870348, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487-0348, USA

    Kristina L. McDonald

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto- Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Mississauga, ON, L5L1C6, Canada

    Tina Malti

  3. Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, 3304 Benjamin Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742-1131, USA

    Melanie Killen & Kenneth H. Rubin

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  1. Kristina L. McDonald
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  2. Tina Malti
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Correspondence to Kristina L. McDonald.

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McDonald, K.L., Malti, T., Killen, M. et al. Best Friends’ Discussions of Social Dilemmas. J Youth Adolescence 43, 233–244 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-013-9961-1

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