Interaction Modalities and the Emergence of Social Values in Children

The social values have been studied from different perspectives. Most of researches, are conducted to determine how cooperative or individualistic a society is. The purpose of this research is to identify the emergence of social values in children during a process of peer interaction, from a sociocultural psychology perspective. We studied 66 children from three Colombian cities who faced a semi-structured situation that involved the construction of an object (alone or together). All couples were record- ed on video. After the micro-genetic analysis (emergent categories), four modalities of accomplishment of the task were identified: Pre-interactional, Interactional-Individual (Convergent), Interactional-Individual (Ambivalent), and Interactional-Cooperative (Convergent). The results indicate that most of the modalities focused on individual work, privileging personal goals with some markers of cooperation. Researchers suggest exploring in depth the dynamics of peer relations in the school contexts.