Children's responses to cooperative and competitive games: A person x situation analysis

This dissertation examined the relations between goal structure, task-completion order, time, and individual differences in agreeableness for school-aged children completing a tower building task. The tower building task (Graziano et al., 1997) allows for the study of in-game behavior during competitive and cooperative tasks with a similar structure. Children completed a total of 13-trials (six per goal structure) under two different goal structures in order to observe changes both prosocial and destructive behaviors over time. Results revealed that children engage in more destructive behaviors over time under contrient goal structure conditions after working together relative to groups that completed contrient goal structure conditions without prior cooperative experiences. Additionally, low agreeable individuals engage in significantly more peer-directed negative vocalizations in contrient trials only if they worked cooperative prior to the experience, suggesting that high agreeable individuals may be less inclined to target peers when frustrated by a shift in task demands.