Disagreement Between Friends

Abstract

This study examined two social factors thought to mediate the beneficial consequences of peer conflict. One was the social relationship between the peers, namely best friend or lukewarm friend. The second was the evaluation of self and partner after performing on the task. Children performed on two tasks: one was an ethnic preference task and the second was a measure of their understanding of multiple emotions. After each, they were given fictitious information about their partner's discrepant judgements, and asked to evaluate the two performances, and then retested for changes to their judgement. The first hypothesis was that a best friend's performance would be evaluated more highly than a lukewarm friend's. The second hypothesis was that evaluation of own judgements would be lower after disagreement with a best friend than a lukewarm friend. The third hypothesis was that judgement changes would be correlated with evaluations. The three hypotheses were confirmed differentially, depending on the task. Results were discussed in terms of the link between interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict.