This study examines the relationship between reputational threat and altruistic behavior in children aged 6-11 and explores how social inhibition and group relationships affect this behavior. Study 1 involved 204 children and found that age and reputational threat influence altruism, with age 8 being a key turning point. Study 2 focused on 130…

Introduction: Social competence in school students has been studied extensively in terms of their being socially competent or not. However, there has been little analysis of how teachers contribute to the development of these skills. This research assesses the influence of teachers' assertiveness on the social competence of their students and on…

Children and adolescents evaluated group inclusion and exclusion in the context of generic and group-specific norms involving morality and social conventions. Participants ("N" = 381), aged 9.5 and 13.5 years, judged an in-group member's decision to deviate from the norms of the group, whom to include, and whether their personal…

Collective efficacy, defined as informal social controls that operate under social norms of trust, is an emerging theoretical concept that has been applied to explain violence rates in neighborhoods, affiliation with deviant peers, partner violence, and adolescent delinquency. This study employed a multilevel design to examine the association…

Peer nominations are used widely in psychological and sociological research to examine intergroup dynamics, even though this assessment tool suffers from thorny methodological problems: Gender, ethnic, age, and trait compositions vary across subsamples, subjects differ in the number of nominations they make, and the issue of sampling without…

Black children generally receive poorer sociometric nominations compared with Whites. This effect is not fully understood because Black children rarely hold a classroom majority and teachers' race is rarely investigated. Research from a person-environment perspective suggests that the effects of children's race depend on the racial composition of…

Drawing from social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), an experiment was carried out to determine the extent to which children's attitudes towards bullying could be moderated by in-group norms and perceived threat to group distinctiveness. The study investigated the responses of 120 male primary school students aged 10-13 years from five…