社会的協同の場に於ける先輩と後輩

抄録

The present investigation was conducted to determine the effect of social situation upon the dehavior of children engaged in play activities.
The apparatus consisted of a miniature electric car and a loopline. The whole route was devided into four sections, each of which went in an dependent circuit. In each circuit was placed a switch. When this switch was turned in one direction, the circuit was cut and the running car was stopped, and when turned in the opposite direction, the car would start runing again. One of the sections had also two other switches, one a master switch which had control of all the circuits and the other one was connected with a buzzer which, when in operation, signalized the starting of the car. All the switches were connected with. a recorder which recorded automatically all the operations of the subjects with these switches on a sliding paper. The experimenter noted every significant word uttered by the subjects during the play and wrote it down on this paper with a pencil (Fig. 1 and 2 2 in the text).
30 nine-year-old children including 20 boys and 10 girls participated in this experiment. Of these, 8 boys and 4 girls were trained in the play three times previous in the experiment, each session comprising 45 minutes. The children were devided into 3 groups of 10, each of which was furthur devided into 3 subgroups. Design of grouping follows:
If you add these figures up, you will get 36. This is because, in each of the three groups, 2 of the 3 children who had previous experience participated twice as members of the two subgroups.
4 children in a subgroup played together as a unit. One of the experienced children occupied the section with three switches. The other three were distributed to the remaining three sections. Thus, each child had control of at least one switch. The play consisted in the subject's operating the switch, thereby stopping the car as it ran. into his section and starting it again if he (she) so desired. One session of the experiment took 45 minutes.
Results are summarized as follows:
1) Smaller the number of the children with experience in a group, freer became the behavior of the children in it and vice versa.
2) Children with previous training were, as it were, the carrier of the tradition which they themselves had established. In whichever subgroupthey were in, they tried unconsciousy to carry on this tradition. And through this tradition they influenced the other members of group.
3) in cases where the numbers of the children with training and those without training were not equal, the former was more self-centered and not cooperative.
It may be concluded generally that the child in a given soial situation will behave in accordance with the status assigned to him in that situation.