Abstract

CALHEIROS, Taís da Costa et al. Effects of exposure to corresponding and discrepant instructions on the behavior of following rules for school age children. Perspectivas [online]. 2012, vol.3, n.1, pp. 57-72. ISSN 2177-3548.

Can rule-following be affected by the reliability of the speaker? The objective of this research was to determine the effects of corresponding/discrepant instructions on the behavior of following rules with immediate reinforcement conditions and in the absence of differential reinforcement. Sixteen children between the ages of 5 and 9 participated in the study, eight in both experiments. In each experiment, they were divided into two groups. The child's task was to choose between colors, following or not the instruction presented by a puppet. The experiments were divided into phases (ABC Experiment I and ABCD Experiment II) and each one contained two conditions (Training - differential reinforcement of choice answers and Test - without differential reinforcement). The phases were distinguished in function to the percentage of corresponding instructions (Phase A - 100%; B - 50%; C - 0%; D - repeating the first phase). The groups that began with the Phase A presented a higher consistency on the rule-following (69,29%) compared with the groups that started with the Phase C (61,96%). Those results show that the reliability in the speaker is related to the fact that the rule can correspond with the consequences produced by its following.

Keywords : rule-governed behavior; instructional control; verbal behavior; reliability.

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