Poster #226 - Norm Enforcement for Rule Abiding among Friends: Prevention versus Intervention Strategies

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Recent studies about how children enforce conventional norms with others focus on children’s reactions after a violation occurs. However, children also frequently prevent others’ potential attempts at rule breaching before an actual violation occurs. We need to distinguish between prevention (i.e., before a potential violation) and intervention (i.e., after an actual violation) strategies used to enforce norms with friends to determine whether the degree of power assertiveness differs in these two forms of strategies. When experiencing a dilemma of achieving conformity to an arbitrary rule and avoiding disruption of a relationship with a friend, children may rely more on strategies with relatively low power assertiveness for preventing their friends from committing a transgression. However, once a rule is already violated, children may react to the situation via strategies with high power assertiveness to be able to intervene in ongoing action. In this study, we examined different forms of norm enforcement strategies as prevention or intervention, and investigated which prevention strategies were more likely to change friend’s subsequent compliance behavior.
The sample was 90 same-sex familiar friend dyads of 4- to 6-year olds (Mage = 64.18 month, SDage = 9.32, Range = 48-83 months). We used a modified version of the temptation resistance paradigm (Kochanska & Aksan, 1995) to examine norm enforcement strategies. Children were instructed not to touch some attractive toys on an off-limit shelf and left alone in the room. We coded children’s verbal and nonverbal strategies to prevent a potential transgression and to intervene after an actual violation. The categories included gentle control (i.e., low power assertiveness such as rule reminding or distracting), negative control (i.e., high power assertiveness such as commands or threats), and disengagement (i.e., no power assertiveness as there is no response).
A total of 340 codable events where one child reacted to other child’s behavior either in prevention or intervention mode were observed (N = 78 children from 53 dyads). The rest of the sample (N = 98 children from 64 dyads) did not produce any codable event because they never attempted to transgress when they were alone in the room. The results showed that children tended to prevent their friend from transgressing the rule by using gentle control strategies. However, after the rule was violated, they were more likely to disengage. To examine whether prevention strategy of one child altered the subsequent compliance behavior of the other child, we run sequential analysis by using the Generalized Sequential Querier (Bakeman & Quera, 1995). Among prevention strategies, gentle control facilitated, whereas disengagement inhibited subsequent compliance. This association was evident for both girls and boys and only for young children (M = 57.33, SD = 4.66, Range = 48-64 months; N = 34, 49%). Negative control was not associated either with prevention/intervention or compliance behavior.
Taken together, these results suggested that norm enforcement strategies that are preventive in nature differ qualitatively from intervention strategies in degree of power assertiveness. Preventive strategies with no-to-low degree of power assertiveness are significant for altering friend’s subsequent compliance behavior.

Authors

• Hilal H. Sen, Koc University
  Presenting Author

• Aylin Küntay, Koc University
  Non-Presenting Author