Children in Cooperation and Competition: The role of Entitlement and Deservedness

Abstract

My research started as a propaedeutic attempt as a social psychologist in a developmentally and clinically oriented department to counteract graduate students’ focus on the individual psyche by wanting to demonstrate some social effects children may have on each other. The method evolved proved surprisingly reliable and versatile, and hence remained in its basic features almost unaltered. Most of the time, children are studied within the familiar setting of their elementary schools. In a spare classroom, different social fields are produced through instructions that create various degrees of competitive or cooperative conditions in which groups of children are placed. The basic controlled procedure consists of engaging several children—usually like-sexed triads—in a task which involves construction of a flat block design on a round table top (the “Pep-board”). The task varies from exact specification of a model to copy to a wholly unstructured request that the child make anything s/he wishes. Depending on the particular variable being studied, children are asked either to work together to make one product (role-related cooperation) or to work on their own product on the same table (coaction), or explicitly instructed to “see which one of you can make the best X” (competitive coaction). Polaroid photographs are taken of the products and later used for scoring.

A companion article describing the historical and theoretical context of this work is in the Research section.