The roles of information, communication, and partner competence in collaborative gains in social reasonin

Research has discovered that peer collaboration leads to greater rates of improvement in reasoning about hypothetical social conflict dilemmas than reasoning alone. This project investigated three factors that the collaboration literature suggests are responsible for this effectiveness. Study 1 investigated two of these factors: a moderate disparity in competence between collaborators; and the production during collaboration of transactive communication, i.e., reasoning by a discussant that acts upon the reasoning of another discussant. In a pretest/posttest design, male (n=58) participants were assigned on the basis of pretest scores to one of two equal-competence groups of dyads (High/High and Low/Low) and one group of disparate competence collaborative (High/Low) to reason collaboratively about two hypothetical dating dilemmas. As predicted, dyads in the High/Low condition improved their performance more frequently than dyads in the High/High and Low/Low conditions, and higher rates of some forms of transactive communication during the collaboration session were associated with improvement. However, results indicated that the effects of disparity in competence and rates of transactive communication were mediated by the specifics of the reasoning task.;Study 2 investigated the role of information transfer due to social influences on social reasoning performance. Participants not selected for Study 1 were randomly assigned to a controlled pretest/posttest experiment with four groups (n=36). Three groups considered transcripts modeling high-level, mid-level or low-level information before reasoning about dating dilemmas. The fourth group reasoned without transcripts. The groups receiving high- or mid-level information outperformed the groups who received low-level transcripts or who reasoned alone; however, these differences were not maintained at posttest. Performance was associated with the level of information presented in the transcripts and was not associated with the direct transfer of information from the transcripts to participants' responses.;These two studies together suggest that discussion in the context of peer interaction may be a uniquely advantageous intervention for the facilitation of improvement in social reasoning. This intervention may be most effective when task parameters and a moderate disparity in competence between collaborators lead to transactive discussion, which in turn allows participants to recognize and retain higher-level principles of social reasoning.