A Developmental Research Of Intragroup Interpersonal Obligations

As a social organism,human behavior often occurs in a more complex social group situation.Previous studies have found that in the face of this social group information,people do not only think that members of a group have similarities in behaviors,but also hold certain interpersonal obligations beliefs in the intragroup social interaction behaviors.Interpersonal obligations belief constrains the interaction mode among group members,which comes from the internal self-discipline requirement rather than the external mandatory regulation.Previous studies have revealed that children aged 3-9 have a belief in interpersonal obligations in which the members within a group should not harm each other.But children are highly dependent on the affiliated groups to realize their own needs and interests,and this feature possibly makes interpersonal obligations beliefs specific to this stage when understanding and predicting the interaction patterns between intragroup members.Whether it still exists in the subsequent development stages is still unclear.Moreover,the interpersonal obligations concerned by previous studies is limited to negative interaction of harming,but interpersonal interaction includes not only the negative aspect,but also the positive behavior,such as helping.It remains unclear whether people hold some interpersonal obligations for helping behaviors among ingroup members and what developmental characteristics they show.Therefore,this study intends to explore the developmental characteristics of people's belief in interpersonal obligations,from both negative harming and positive helping behaviors.According to the development characteristics of social ability,this research selects three age groups(children aged 7-9 years,teenagers aged 13-15 years and youths aged 19-21 years)to explore the development of intragroup interpersonal obligations by three experiments in two studies,with both harming and helping behaviors.In the two experiments of the first study,the subjects in three age groups(children aged 7-9 years,teenagers aged 13-15 years and youths aged 19-21 years)were presented with intragroup and intergroup harming(i.e.,injury)behaviors,respectively,and their beliefs of interpersonal obligations of non-harm to intragroup members were measured.These experiments were set to explore the development characteristics of intragroup interpersonal obligations of non-harm among ingroup members.In specific,Experiment 1 referred to the previous research paradigm and manipulated the group by setting the way that members in the group cooperate to complete a task goal(i.e.the group formed with task clues).However,the operation of cooperative task implies that members belonging to the same group should not harm each other in order to achieve the common goal,and accordingly the results may reflect the role of task operation rather than the role of social groups.In this case,Experiment 2 manipulated the group by presenting visual perceptual cues(e.g.,spatial proximity of several cartoon characters with similar motion patterns).The group formed by this method can only define the existence of the social group,and does not contain any empirical knowledge of the group.Study 2 explored the developmental characteristics of interpersonal obligations beliefs that helping intragroup members through three age groups with an experiment.Given that Experiment 2 can overcome the limitations of Experiment 1 on the group operation,Experiment 3 adopts the same method as Experiment 2 to present group information,in order to measure the interpersonal obligations belief that helping each other of ingroup members through three age groups.A series of experiments in both studies found that people's beliefs about whether there is intragroup interpersonal obligations to not harm each other and to help each other varies by stages of development.Specifically,both children aged 7-9 years and teenagers aged 13-15 years hold beliefs that people obligate to not harm each other and help each other,but this belief disappears among youths aged 19-21 years.The revelation of this development characteristics can help us to understand how the development of social ability affects the learning of the knowledge of interpersonal obligations,and has important enlightening significance to construct how the internal interpersonal obligations and external regulations jointly restrain people's behavior in theory,as well as in the practical teaching.