The Narrative Approach to Reality in Relation to Children's Cooperative Interaction

Abstract

It was hypothesized that children who use a narrative style of classification are more capable of cooperating with a play-mate than children who use a logical style of classification. Participants were 907-year-old children: 50 females and 40 males. Style of classification was studied by giving the subjects 13 miniature toys to classify. Three main classification criteria were distinguished: categorical, functional and narrative. Forty-five children who classified the objects by category without making use of narrative were designated as logical, 45 children who classified the objects chiefly by narrative criteria were identified as narrative classifiers. Three experimental groups were formed: a logical-logical group consisting of 15 dyads of logical subjects; a narrative-narrative group consisting of 15 dyads of narrative subjects, and a logical-narrative group consisting of 15 dyads composed of one narrative subject and one logical subject. Each subject was asked to perform a cooperative task with a narrative or a logical companion. The task entailed manoeuvring a pulley device that required coordination between the members of the dyad. The children's proficiency at the task was analysed by computing the number of errors each dyad made. The results showed that narrative-narrative dyads were more capable of carrying out the task and cooperating than logical-logical dyads.