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Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

plymouth.ac.uk

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Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#31

Post by swayvil »

mherdeg wrote: post #9
sandworm101 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern schools, most any deviation from prescribed behavior is considered "rule breaking". A kid playing a game they way they want to play it, rather than the way they were taught to play it, is a disruptive kid that needs correction by peers or authority figures.

I've seen this! When the toddler plays an iPad game he likes to start by "failing" (choosing the wrong option, deliberately crashing a toy car, doing nothing at all) and watching what happens. It looks to me like he's basically experimenting - trying things and watching what happens. I generally just let him try and fail (and discuss what happened with him) and after about 1-2 minutes he tries the "right" thing becau…

It's like that with Lego.

Some people grab the bricks, mess around, create and destroy chaotically, explore.

But then there's this whole other culture. They create the thing described by the directions, step by step.

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#32

Post by swayvil »

carom wrote: post #12

Tangentially related, I've looked for research in the past on what compels people to report rule breakers. I find it super interesting that people want to get other people in trouble over (often) things that don't negatively affect them, but instead are just "the rules".

In a society with rules and such, if you're in a battle for social dominance, the rules are your best weapon.

You just need to find a way to create a narrative painting your opponent as a rule-breaker. Evidence needs to be interpreted appropriately, etc.

"If you're in a battle for social dominance" is key, of course.

Consider the present popularity of "victimhood".

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#33

Post by slibhb »

TameAntelope wrote: post #7

Eh, the study calls "rule breakers" the children who seemingly make mistakes applying a set of rules to a puzzle. These aren't kids acting out in class and being put back in line by their peers, it's two kids doing some pair programming. Am I "confronting" my coworker when I suggest a different way to loop than the one they implemented? Nothing wrong with the study, just saying the word "challenging" is not used here…

I don't think your criticism is valid. Children often play games that have rules. Comparing candyland or soccer or "block game we inevented for this experiment" to different ways of programming a loop misses the point.

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#34

Post by aidenn0 »

dmurray wrote: post #29
zomglings wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rule? I didn't watch the movie nor do I know much about James Bond beyond watching a few of the films over the past few decades.

Spoiler (obviously) but trying not to give away too much, I'm sure the rule in question is that the hero is meant to live happily ever after.

Except that never applied to Bond; any time he seemed to be about to have some semblance of a normal life terrible stuff happens to him and/or his loved one(s).

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#35

Post by aidenn0 »

_jal wrote: post #26
carom wrote: post #12

Tangentially related, I've looked for research in the past on what compels people to report rule breakers. I find it super interesting that people want to get other people in trouble over (often) things that don't negatively affect them, but instead are just "the rules".

> I find it super interesting that people want to get other people in trouble over (often) things that don't negatively affect them I find it super interesting that people don't see a gradient here. On one extreme, you have something like crossing the street against the light when nobody is at the intersection. On the other, you have all sorts of horrific things done to other people. I'm pretty sure that the bulk of…

> I find it super interesting that people don't see a gradient here.

People tend to divide rules into 2 buckets: Ones that are inviolable and ones that are silly. It's like the old joke that "everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster is a maniac."

In tight-knit homogeneous societies, this leads to a set of "unwritten rules," but in less well-connected or less homogeneous societies, this leads to quite a bit of friction and people harassing each other. My friend is a cop and he gets called to a lot of apartment complexes where there are two cultures abutting each other (e.g. Mexicano and non-hispanic) and it's just both sides calling the cops on each other (in his estimation) not out of racism, but because they disagree on the unwritten rules. Then as each side becomes more convinced of their moral superiority (because we obey all the important rules), the arguments become more and more petty and ticky-tacky.

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#36

Post by aidenn0 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #21
yosito wrote: post #5

So, kids are tattle tales? Did we need a study to tell us this?

> So, kids are tattle tales? No, tattle tales report rule breaking to third-party authorities. This is about direct intervention with the rule-breaker. > Did we need a study to tell us this? If we want to quantify and see how it varies across, say, the urban/rural divide (as this does with challenging), then, yes, certainly, but it's not this study.

In my experience kids are tattle tales when they have had their power to intervene directly significantly curtailed. I remember a kid asking me to tell my daughter to stop doing some behavior (she was a few years younger than him). I asked him if he had already asked her to stop and he looked at me like I was from mars.

At least where I live, many kids have been taught in many ways that direct intervention is something that will get them in trouble, and tattle-tales are at least partly a result of that.

This is also IMO why girls are more likely to tattle-tale. Girls, on average, get in way more trouble for instigating physical violence than boys, so they have had one method of direct intervention more strongly curtailed.

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#37

Post by OtomotO »

sandworm101 wrote: post #8
TameAntelope wrote: post #7

Eh, the study calls "rule breakers" the children who seemingly make mistakes applying a set of rules to a puzzle. These aren't kids acting out in class and being put back in line by their peers, it's two kids doing some pair programming. Am I "confronting" my coworker when I suggest a different way to loop than the one they implemented? Nothing wrong with the study, just saying the word "challenging" is not used here…

In modern schools, most any deviation from prescribed behavior is considered "rule breaking". A kid playing a game they way they want to play it, rather than the way they were taught to play it, is a disruptive kid that needs correction by peers or authority figures.

You're talking about US modern schools, right? (Genuine question)

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#38

Post by javajosh »

carom wrote: post #12

Tangentially related, I've looked for research in the past on what compels people to report rule breakers. I find it super interesting that people want to get other people in trouble over (often) things that don't negatively affect them, but instead are just "the rules".

For some kids this just means they trust that the rules are there for a very good reason, and so are intrinsically good to follow. As a parent one hopes that your kids come to see your rules in that light, rather than as a tool to exercise power or maximize personal convenience, or any number of abuses.

The tricky rules are the very non-obvious ones, like those involving seat belts. Insurance against very infrequent events are difficult to motivate, and require a sophisticated understanding of risk to not seem arbitrary. (And given the number of baby-boomers who managed to survive childhood despite being thrown into a large back-seat with no seat-belts at all tells me that these rules might not be as wise as we think!)

Reporting rule-breakers is, of course, slightly different because now rule-breaking is not intrinsically bad, but extrinsically good to the person doing the turning in. (The motivation must be power and indirect punishment, and not compassion, because otherwise you'd talk to the rule-breaker first.) This is a favorite weapon that siblings naturally wield against each other at a very young age. That is the perversity of it rules, is that a human's first innocent instinct is to abuse them to harm a sibling. Ain't that something?

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#39

Post by [deleted] »

TameAntelope wrote: post #7

Eh, the study calls "rule breakers" the children who seemingly make mistakes applying a set of rules to a puzzle. These aren't kids acting out in class and being put back in line by their peers, it's two kids doing some pair programming. Am I "confronting" my coworker when I suggest a different way to loop than the one they implemented? Nothing wrong with the study, just saying the word "challenging" is not used here…

[deleted]

Re: Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

#40

Post by V-2 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #7

Eh, the study calls "rule breakers" the children who seemingly make mistakes applying a set of rules to a puzzle. These aren't kids acting out in class and being put back in line by their peers, it's two kids doing some pair programming. Am I "confronting" my coworker when I suggest a different way to loop than the one they implemented? Nothing wrong with the study, just saying the word "challenging" is not used here…

A valid point, although it's probably the article, not the study itself. The actual title is "Children across societies enforce conventional norms but in culturally variable ways". I say "probably", because I haven't looked into the paper - perhaps it does use this terminology after all (but I doubt it).
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