The care or neglect which people bestow on the appearance and cleanliness of the public places in which they live and work is the central focus of this paper. Basically the phenomenon that is studied is that encountered when people who are usually law abiding, orderly, and responsible citizens deviate from the prescribed and insituttionalized…

People take their folk gestures seriously, which is illustrated in the fact that several folk gestures, such as raising the right hand and kissing the Bible, are used in religious and legal ceremonies. These and other gestures, such as making the sign of the cross and knocking on wood, are folk gestures used today which have their roots in early…

Frequency of aggression in 5- to 8-year-old children was examined in relation to frequency of helping, comforting and sharing. Subjects (39 boys and 40 girls attending a summer day camp) were each observed for two hours and their aggressive and prosocial behaviors recorded. This study differed from previous investigations of this issue in two…

The purpose of this study was to determine the predicted differences in the effectiveness of social approval and disapproval cues. Three hypotheses were tested to determine what the effect on communication is if the source of the cue is a peer, family member, or society and what the response will be when a message advocates a position discrepant…

The aim of attitude measurement is to derive indices of socially significant behavior. It is therefore necessary to broaden the basis of measurement to include data derived from a variety of sources. The widening gulf between the increasing sophistication of measurement and the relatively crude conceptualizations on which it is based is likely…

To investigate the effect of modeling on altruism, 156 third and fifth grade children were exposed to a model who either shared with them, gave to a charity, or refused to share. The test apparatus, identified as a game, consisted of a box with signal lights and a chute through which marbles were dispensed. Subjects and the model played the game…

Social control and human engineering are vital factors in providing balanced, controlled, planned directions for educational decisionmaking. Designed to encourage individual growth, these factors are morally neutral; the way in which they are implemented determines their worth. (Author)

This report is one of three concerning the 1972-73 field test of the Inquiry Role Approach (IRA) to biology teaching developed by the staff of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL), Kansas City, Missouri. This paper is focused on the measurement of social skills and attitudinal development of IRA biology students. The IRA…

This study provides evidence for the validity of the Social Adequacy subscales of the Psychosocial Maturity Inventory: Social Commitment, Tolerance, and Openness to Change. A group of students who invested substantial time and energy in social action projects directed toward helping others was compared with a randomly chosen control group. The…

To enhance knowledge of television content, a prosocial code was developed by watching a large number of potentially prosocial television programs and making notes on all the positive acts. The behaviors were classified into a workable number of categories. The prosocial code is largely verbal and contains seven categories which fall into two…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the function served by self-adaptor type behaviors (defined here as "hand touch" on the face, body, the other hand, and the fingers) in order to discover why people perform self-adaptors and what happens when they do. Following an extensive review of the literature, it is proposed that…

This volume of a 2 volume report presents an historical study of collective student conflict and violence in America and a framework for analyzing the internal and external dynamics of current student disorders in America. In the historical segment collective student behavior is categorized into 4 classes: faddism, deprivation, normative action,…

A study was conducted to observe the behavior of preschool children (1) varying in age, sex and identified by teachers as thriving or not thriving; (2) in day care programs differing in mode of choice-making, i.e., teacher initiates or child initiates; (3) in the context of an analysis of physical setting and program structure; and (4) in terms of…

The study of children's group formation employs Piaget's cognitive-development theory along with ethological concepts and methods used in the naturalistic study of the social behavior of animals. It represents the first application of ethological ideal to a study of the child's conception of his social world, and focuses on his conceptions of the…

This investigation used social psychological concepts in analysis of social processes among pupils engaged in a cooperative task. It explored several ways of increasing interdependence among participants and determined the effects of such conditions on pupil performance. The subjects were 228 randomly selected fourth and fifth grade students. The…