Generalization of Changes in Children's Preferences for Easy or Difficult Goals Induced through Peer Modeling

Abstract

SAGOTSKY, GERALD, and LEPPER, MAFX R. Generalization of Changes in Children's Preferences for Easy or Difficult Goals Induced through Peer Modeling. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 372-375. This experiment explored the generalization of changes in children's preferences for easy or difficult goals, induced by exposure to peer models. Elementary school children observed a peer model play a novel athletic game, consistently choosing either difficult or easy goals for himself, or saw no model. Immediately afterward, subjects played this same game themselves. 3 weeks later, subjects participated in a bee, selecting the difficulty level of the words they wished to attempt. 2 months later, in their regular classrooms, subjects were offered a choice of puzzles of differing levels of difficulty by their teachers. During the first session, subjects exposed to a model who preferred difficult goals chose more difficult goals themselves than subjects who had seen either a model who preferred easy goals or no model. 3 weeks later, similar results were evident in subjects' choices of spelling words. Dissociated classroom measures yielded comparable results, for females, 2 months later.