Efeitos de histórias experimentais e de justificativas sociais sobre o comportamento de seguir e não seguir regras em crianças

Abstract

The present study had the objective of investigating the effects of social justifications on the occurrence of rule following and not following behavior in children, when an experimental history of reinforcement for correspondent rule following and for not following rules. Twenty children ranging from seven and nine years of age were exposed to a matching to sample procedure, which task consisted in touching one of two comparison stimuli in the presence of a contextual stimulus. The participants were equally distributed into four experimental conditions, each one constituted of four phases. In Conditions I and II, Phases 1, 2 and 4 began with the presentation of instructions that were correspondent to the programmed contingencies of reinforcement. Behavior of rule following produced tokens exchangeable for toys and not following them produced no tokens. Phase 3 began with the presentation of a correspondent instruction that contained a justification on why not to follow the instruction. The two conditions differed on the type of justification given in Phase 3. In Condition I the justification was to help children in need and in Condition II the justification involved approval from the experimenter. In Condition III and IV, Phases 1, 2 and 4 began with the presentation of instructions that were discrepant to the programmed contingencies of reinforcement. Behavior of rule following produced token loss and not following them avoided token loss. Phase 3 began with the presentation of a correspondent instruction that contained a justification on why to follow the instruction that led to token loss. The two conditions differed on the type of justification given in Phase 3. In Condition III the justification was to help children in need and in Condition IV the justification involved approval from the experimenter. The results showed that the behavior of 17 out of 20 participants came under control of the experimental history of reinforcement of following and not following the instructions and of the immediate consequences produced by instruction following and not following behavior (win or avoid token loss). The behavior of two participants (Condition II) came under control of the social justification (experimenter´s approval) presented for the emission of an alternative behavior to the one that produced tokens and another participant´s behavior (Condition III) came under control of the social justification (helping others) to follow the correspondent instruction, which produced token loss. These results support both the statement that rules are followed due to a history that rule-following was reinforced and not following was punished, as well as the statement that rules are followed, in part, due to justifications to its following or not following.