“We must do what the leader says” – Children’s understanding of the rules of cooperation (original) (raw)
Analysis of group process: Cooperation of preschool children
Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 1994
In this research paper, cooperation is studied from a group process perspective within free play of children ages 2, 3 and 4. Two 30-minute sessions were videotaped for each of the groups of children. These recordings allowed us to observe various dimensions of cooperation in an activity, such as the number of children in each subgroup , kind of play and type of activity. These observational analyses show that cooperation is present at every age but may develop rapidly at certain ages and plateau at others. Furthermore, group play is not the culmination of a linear developmental process, its modifications in quantity between the two youngest and the oldest group suggest a cooperation continuum of its own, with large variations between groups within each age group. Resume Ce travail de recherche £tudie la cooperation du point de vue d'un processus de groupe, dans le contexte des jeux libres d'enfants ag£s de 2, 3 et 4 ans. Pour chaque groupe d'enfants, nous avons enregistre deux seances de 30 minutes sur bande vid6o. Ces enregistrements nous ont permis d'observer diverses dimensions de cooperation presentes au cours d'une activity, telles le nombre d'enfants de chaque sous-groupe, le genre de jeux et le type d'activite's auxquels ils se livrent. Ces analyses d'observation demontrent que la cooperation existe a tout age, bien qu'elle puisse evoluer rapidement a un certain age et atteindre un plateau a un autre. De plus, les jeux en groupe ne represented pas la culmination d'un processus d'evolution lm^aire; les modifications de quantity entre les jeux en groupe des deux plus jeunes groupes et du plus vieux suggerent l'existence independante d'un continuum de cooperation, qui pr&ente de grandes variations entre les differents groupes d'enfants d'un meme age.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2009
Young children engage in a constant process of negotiating and constructing rules, utilizing these rules as cultural resources to manage their social interactions. This paper examines how young children make sense of, and also construct, rules within one early childhood classroom. This paper draws on a recent study conducted in Australia, in which video-recorded episodes of young children's talk-in-interaction were examined. Analysis revealed four interactional practices that the children used, including manipulating materials and places to claim ownership of resources within the play space; developing or using pre-existing rules and social orders to control the interactions of their peers; strategically using language to regulate the actions of those around them; and creating and using membership categories such as 'car owner' or 'team member' to include or exclude others and also to control and participate in the unfolding interaction. While the classroom setting was framed within adult conceptions and regulations, analysis of the children's interaction demonstrated their co-constructions of social order and imposition of their own forms of rules. Young children negotiated both adult constructed social order and also their own peer constructed social order, drawing upon various rules within both social orders as cultural resources by which they managed their interaction.
The Cognitive and Communicative Demands of Cooperation
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
I argue that the analysis of different kinds of cooperation will benefit from an account of the cognitive and communicative functions required for that cooperation. I review different models of cooperation in game theory-reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, cooperation about future goals, and conventionswith respect to their cognitive and communicative prerequisites. The cognitive factors considered include recognition of individuals, memory capacity, temporal discounting, prospective cognition, and theory of mind. Whereas many forms of cooperation require no communication or just simple communication, more advanced forms that are unique to humans presuppose full symbolic communication. 1 A stronger criterion, focused on human cooperation, is formulated by Bowles and Gintis [8]: "An individual behavior that incurs personal costs in order to engage in a joint activity that confers benefits exceeding these costs to other members of one's group." It should be noted that 'joint' activity need not imply that the actions are performed simultaneously: they can be done in sequence.
Teaching children cooperation — An application of experimental game theory
2000
This paper studies children's behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game. I attempted to teach children cooperation by means of a short moral lecture. Over the period of 12 months, I experimented with 196 children between the ages of six and eleven. The experimental findings are as follows. (1) In support of the developmental psychology theories, the proportions of cooperation are indeed higher for older children. (2) There is a positive short-run teaching effect: the proportion of cooperative individual increases significantly immediately after the lecture. However, a moral lecture 12 months before has no significant effect on children's behavior.
Let's share perspectives! Mentalistic skills involved in cooperation
Previous research has found a link between theory of mind and cooperation. The aim of this study is to deepen into this relationship, to identify which theory of mind skills are more related to the cooperative ability on a referential communication task. A total of 50 children from first and fifth grade completed a battery of theory of mind tasks, and also a cooperative task where children worked in pairs to build block models. Each pair was composed by a builder and a guide, who gave instructions to his partner about how to build a replica of the model. The results show a significant relationship between the theory of mind skills and cooperation. Specifically, we found that the second-order false-belief task was the variable most related to cooperation after controlling the effect of age. In addition, we observed that the mentalist skills were more important for cooperation in the builders than in the guides. Finally, we discuss the findings of this study and make suggestions for the future.
We can work it out: An enactive look at cooperation
The past years have seen an increasing debate on cooperation and its unique human character. Philosophers and psychologists have proposed that cooperative activities are characterized by shared goals to which participants are committed through the ability to understand each other's intentions. Despite its popularity, some serious issues arise with this approach to cooperation. First, one may challenge the assumption that high-level mental processes are necessary for engaging in acting cooperatively. If they are, then how do agents that do not possess such ability (preverbal children, or children with autism who are often claimed to be mind-blind) engage in cooperative exchanges, as the evidence suggests? Secondly, to define cooperation as the result of two de-contextualized minds reading each other's intentions may fail to fully acknowledge the complexity of situated, interactional dynamics and the interplay of variables such as the participants' relational and personal history and experience. In this paper we challenge such accounts of cooperation, calling for an embodied approach that sees cooperation not only as an individual attitude toward the other, but also as a property of interaction processes. Taking an enactive perspective, we argue that cooperation is an intrinsic part of any interaction, and that there can be cooperative interaction before complex communicative abilities are achieved. The issue then is not whether one is able or not to read the other's intentions, but what it takes to participate in joint action. From this basic account, it should be possible to build up more complex forms of cooperation as needed. Addressing the study of cooperation in these terms may enhance our understanding of human social development, and foster our knowledge of different ways of engaging with others, as in the case of autism.
The Logic of Young Children's (Nonverbal) Behavior
2001
This paper asserts that teachers need to understand the logic of young children's behavior in their joint play and in their conflicts in order to respond sensitively, and that children construct logic-inaction (procedural knowledge) long before they are able to verbalize their logic in narratives. The basic assumption of the paper is that there is a functional continuity between the logic-inaction of young children and the verbalized logic of children's narratives. The paper first examines the concept of "logic" and the basic human motive to construct a "logic" world at the subjective level. The paper then discusses young children's logic-inaction of the sensorimotor period, relating this to some studies of children's co-construction of meaning in peer relations and their prosocial behavior during or after peer conflicts. The paper asserts that in peer conflicts, with or without their teachers' help, young children socialize, a natural heritage also shared with nonhuman primates in situations of conflict resolution. Finally, the paper explores the teacher's role in peer conflicts. (Contains 37 references.) (EV) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
The violation of the cooperative maxim in early childhood: A pragmatic case study
International Journal of Evaluation and Research in Education (IJERE)
The study examined the violation of the maxim of cooperation in early childhood conversation be means of a pragmatic case study, which is an important undertaking given the strong influence of the surrounding environment on children’s language development. Previous studies have delved into this area, particularly with regard to children with special needs, but have not widely explored how such a violation emerges in the early childhood period. Here, we adopted a qualitative approach using a pragmatic case study design, and over seven months collected data by observing, listening to and recording the conversations of a 4-year-old boy. The results of this process were used as transcripts for conversation data. Specifically, we found that of the 40 conversation data items concerning the form of cooperative maxim violations, there were 13 (32.5%) conversation data items. These results indicate that children in the early childhood period already possess pragmatic abilities, as evidenced ...
Children's Norm Enforcement in Their Interactions With Peers
This study investigates how children negotiate social norms with peers. In Study 1, 48 pairs of 3-and 5-yearolds (N = 96) and in Study 2, 48 pairs of 5-and 7-year-olds (N = 96) were presented with sorting tasks with conflicting instructions (one child by color, the other by shape) or identical instructions. Three-year-olds differed from older children: They were less selective for the contexts in which they enforced norms, and they (as well as the older children to a lesser extent) used grammatical constructions objectifying the norms ("It works like this" rather than "You must do it like this"). These results suggested that children's understanding of social norms becomes more flexible during the preschool years.
Cooperation in Children: Social and Material Rewards
Psychological Reports, 1977
Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of reward on cooperation in preschool children. Pairs of children were asked to move a stylus laterally in either direction into a circle by manipulating attached strings. In Exp. 1 ( n = 32) successful entry into a circle was followed by a complex reward for one group. This rewarded group was told “Good” (social reward), given little foil stars (material reward), and an explanation for receiving the rewards. Compared with children who received no rewards, the rewarded group displayed higher scores in cooperation. In Exp. 2 ( n = 30) three additional groups were given the same task and received one of the following conditions: social reward with explanation, material reward alone, or social reward alone. No significant difference in cooperation was found among these groups.
Functions of Language
This paper proposes a number of refinements to the original theory of Exchange Structure as first conceived. It first offers a summary of the early ideas and considers challenges made by others. The study responds to these challenges through new analysis of multiparty discourse. The paper discusses revisions to the model based on these challenges drawing on the iterative analysis conducted and considers other points relevant to multiparty discourse. The data is drawn from transcribed video recordings of small groups of 4 to 5 year-old children’s peer-led dialogic interactions as they engage in role-play. In addition to the development of Exchange Structure theory, this new analysis sheds light on the nature of negotiation within multiparty discourse and the dynamics of negotiation by young children in this playful context.
Becoming a Social Partner With Peers: Cooperation and Social Understanding in One- and Two-Year-Olds
Child Development, 2006
One-and two-year-old peer dyads were presented with a simple cooperative task. Age differences were found in amount of coordinated activity, monitoring the peer's activity and location in relation to the goal, and attempting to achieve the goal when the peer was (or was not) available as a partner. One-year-olds' coordinated actions appeared more coincidental than cooperative whereas older children appeared to be more actively cooperating toward a shared goal. Differences in coordinated activity with peers were associated with differences in attention sharing with an adult and with language about self and other. The ability to cooperate with peers, becoming a true social partner, develops over the 2nd and 3rd years of life in concert with growing social understanding.
Non-Cooperation as the Rule of Communication
There is general agreement in the field of Pragmatics that human communication is rational and logical. One of the exponents of such hypothesis is philosopher H. Paul Grice, who postulated the existence of general principles that regulate the manner how, in a conversation, the listener is able to recognize, through one’s own reasoning, the speaker’s intention and therefore comprehend the meaning of what the speaker says. Grice asserts that every communication is governed by cooperation, even when one of the interlocutors apparently intervenes in an opposite direction or contrary to the current purpose of the conversation. Each participation in a dialogue is a cooperative effort, and the interlocutors acknowledge that there is a common purpose or, at least, a mutually accepted direction. The fact is that there is a philosophical and ideological tendency to place cooperation as an indispensable condition for the existence of what Barthes (1993) called “The Great Family of Men”. Cooperation is considered a “universal human nature’s” attribute, transcending any local particularities and manifesting itself as an ahistorical condition for the species. Despite the assumption of a general rationality for cooperation and a social basis for cooperative behaviours, in reality there is no tacit commitment that one should proceed in such manner. Mey (1985), Fairclough (1989), Sarangi and Slembrouck (1992), Kopytko (1995), Oliveira (1999), Rajagopalan (2001, 2003), Ladegaard (2009) among others, have highlighted the asymmetry of purposes among speaking parties; the hierarchization of interpersonal relationships; the suspicion about the “two-way” communication and; in particular, the rejection of the belief in a universal and stable basis for the concepts of reason, mind and human languages. In this contradictory, it is wise to invoke Austin (1964), who stresses the need of devoting attention to opposite terms in order to determine if: a) the opposite exists; b) its meaning opposes to the referred term. Therefore, we propose, as the object of this study, a reflection about “the non-cooperation as a rule for communication”, not only as an exception or as examples of the interlocutors’ resistance strategies, illogical or irrational states or, simply, as cases of “flaws” or “bad” communication. This study’s theoretical framework is drawn from Pragmatics and Deconstruction. Keywords: Non-cooperation – Pragmatics – Communication.
Rules Trump Desires in Preschoolers’ Predictions of Group Behavior
Social Development, 2015
The objective of this article is to investigate the way children weigh conventional rules against desires when considering how a group will behave. To do so, two experiments involving a prediction task in which desires were pitted against conventional rules were presented to three-to five-year-old children. In Experiment 1, four scenarios were established as classroom scenes in which either one protagonist or three protagonists had a desire that went against an explicit conventional rule. In the individual control condition, the choices linked to the rules were at chance whereas, in the group condition, the participants predicted that all the protagonists would end up following the rule. Given that both conditions in Experiment 1 implied four rule followers in the design, Experiment 2 staged not three but seven potential rule transgressors to see whether the desire of the majority might undermine the rule. Results showed no majority effect: participants expected protagonists to act counter to their desire and to follow the rule. Such results suggest that children as young as three-year-old favor rules over desires when they have to predict the behavior of a group, whether it be the majority or not. Possible implications of these intriguing findings are discussed.
The Role of Child Characteristics and Peer Experiences in the Development of Peer Cooperation
Social Development, 2015
Cooperation with peers is challenging for young children, and there are large individual differences in the development of cooperation. The roles of child characteristics and peer experiences for peer interaction during free play have been studied extensively, but it is unclear which factors predict young children's successful cooperation at different points in development. In this study, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children were observed during a peer cooperation task. Both their interactive behavior and cooperation success were examined, and the association of these variables with child characteristics and peer experiences was explored. Results showed that successful peer cooperation increased with age. Moreover, early individual differences in peer cooperation were related to temperamental characteristics, and, among older children, the rate of cooperation was related to prior peer experience.
Acquisition of the Co-operative Principle by Algerian Arabic-Speaking Children
International Journal of Linguistics, 2018
In the realm of language acquisition due attention was given to some linguistic areas like phonology and syntax probably at the expense of others such as pragmatics. The aim of this paper is to explore the age at which Algerian Arabic-speaking preschoolers acquire the maxims of the Cooperative Principle developed by Grice (1975), and the order in which these maxims are acquired. Data were elicited from 36 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years who were required to make acceptability judgment of statements uttered in a puppet video-show to indicate their adherence to or violation of the Cooperative Principle. The results of the study have shown that the Cooperative Principle emerged in preschoolers at the age of 3 years where they were able to identify the Cooperative Principle violation. However, their performance improved with age. The results have also demonstrated that preschoolers acquire the maxim of relevance first, followed by the maxim of quality, the maxim of manner and...