Socio‐cognitive conflict and structure of individual and collective performances

Abstract

Abstract A previous experiment (Doise, Mugny and Perret‐Clermont, 1975) has shown that pairs of subjects perform better on a spatial representation task than subjects alone. As a conclusion the hypothesis was put forward that conflicts of cognitive centrations, embedded in a social situation, lead children to coordinate their centrations. The present research was planned to verify several predictions following from this general hypothesis. Results show that indeed more progress takes place when children with different cognitive strategies work together than when children with the same strategies do so, and that not only the less advanced but also the more advanced child progresses when they interact with each other.