The first purpose of the present study is to investigate whether or not the social reinforcement will have an effect on the acquisition of cooperative behavior of children and if so, how effective it will be. The second purpose is to examine in what degree the level of development of cooperation and the ways of giving social reinforcement will influence its effects.
Subjects were32boys and28girls, whose average age was five years, and they were divided into two groups by the pre-test. The first group could cooperate already (H group) and the second could not cooperate yet (L group). In each group Ss were paired, then three exprimental conditions were introduced;1) response reinforcement condition (RR), 2) cue reinforcement one (CR), 3) non reinforcement one (NR). Under RR condition, social reinforcements were given verbally whenever a child shared his instruments with his partner. Under CR condition, E reinforced him just like under RR condition, after suggesting the trouble of his partner to him (ex. A is in trouble, you know, as he hasn't any suitable instruments for his task). Under NR condition no control was given.
The experiment continued for4days;on the middle two days above-mentioned three conditions were operated (training session), while on the first and fourth days no reinforcement was given. Several days after those sessions, the follow-up test was given only to the experimental condition groups (RR & CR) in order to prove the consistency of reinforcement effect. These experiments and tests took about20minutes. The tasks of pre-and post-training session were the same an d could be accomplished even if they didn't work together. On the other hand the training tasks could be only achieved by cooperative exchange of their instruments. Ss'behaviors were observed and recorded in terms of the predetermined behavior categories by E.
The reinforcement effects were measured according to the change of response frequency between pre-and post-training.
The results were as follows.
(1) The two experimental conditions (RR & CR) increased significantly cooperative behavior in the experimental sessions. Furthermore the degree of their increase was larger than that under NR condition. These obtained cooperative behaviors were not extinct in the follow-up test. These results suggest that their reinforced bahaviors occurred seeking for approval.
(2) The level of development of cooperation influenced degree of being reinforced. That is, L group showed significantly more cooperative behaviors than H group.
However, between RR and CR conditions, there were no different effectiveness of social reinforcement. This result was not in accord with the supposition that under CR condition Ss might spontaneously share his instruments with his partner, because they had obtained the response-cue.
Social reinforcement was found to be useful for growing interpersonal behavior such as cooperative behavior, the effects of which were large and stable in spite of being given only2days.
The result of this study en the level of development of cooperative behavior was interpreted as follows;L group showed cooperative behavior seeking for approval in order to reduce emotional tension which they might have more than RR group. Thus, this emotional factor seems to be cne of the important factors which influenced the effects of social reinforcement.
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