Re: Evolutionary Psychology and Sociocultural Theory

Genevieve Patthey-Chavez (ggpcinla who-is-at ucla.edu)
Mon, 6 May 1996 19:18:35 -0800

Interesting to read this. Another one of my favorite transcripts from the
computer lab was a fairly extended (by local standards) problem-solving
session to "lengthen" a student paper that didn't quite measure up to
professorial specifications. Everyone who read that transcript said almost
immediately, "The consultant's hitting on the client." And yet, it was
quite subtle. Affect, emotional self- and other-management was all over
these transcripts. A lot of it had to do with saving face. I didn't try
to code it, but in the little typology I eventually developed, projections
of relative expertise, and a mutual reciprocity in offering and extending
face-saving moves were a key defining feature. That is, acceptable
problem-definitions involved not just "X is wrong," or "you're missing Y,"
but often tacitly incorporated such face-saving features as the "crazy
machine."

Genevieve

>Bill and Vera,
>You raise an interesting question about studies of peer
>collaboration--the affective dimension. Most of the work I know about
>ignores affect pretty well because it is experimental and affect is a
>little difficult to manipulate. However, a few studies (I think Shari
>Ellis did one) have included friends and nonfriends as conditions--which
>does include affect as an experimental variable. Also, some of Margarita
>Azmitia's work on expertise and peer tutoring hints at the role of affect
>when novices who have been secretly trained to perform like experts
>attempt to gain some control over the task and are prevented from doing
>so by their partner (who had been the expert in a previous session).
>
>I find that when I look at individual dyads, the affective dimension
>gains more salience as struggles over dominance as well as attempts to be
>mutually supportive emerge as important aspects of the social interaction
>and the task motives and goals. In one study, I examined each dyad's
>interactions for instances of social support and social interference.
>The supportive interactions predominated throughout but there were some
>notable occurances of interference. However, without doing a detailed
>case study and/or discourse analysis that takes the entire context into
>account, it is often difficult to evaluate the emotional tone of these
>exchanges. For example, in one 4th grade dyad, the boy called his female
>partner "dog face" and she pretended to strangle him with a chain of
>paperclips. Our initial coding of this episode considered this to be
>antagonistic but a more detailed examination showed that they were
>engaged in a preadolescent form of flirting--or so it seemed to us. So
>I'm sceptical about the utility of typical coding systems that aren't
>very sensitive to the broader context or the subtle nuances of discourse
>for characterizing affect.
>Ellice Forman
>
>On Fri, 3 May 1996 BPenuel who-is-at aol.com wrote:
>
>> Ellice-
>>
>> We had been discussing the often absent accounts of affect in cognitive
>> studies of learning, but I had suggested that some of the peer teaching
>> research partly addresses that issue, and that your work on collaboration
>> might be a resource for people interested in this area.
>>
>> Perhaps you or anyone else knows of some other research on affective
>> dimensions of collaboration?
>>
>> Bill Penuel
>> ______________________
>> PreventionInventions
>> PO Box 40692
>> Nashville TN 37204
>> (615) 297-5923
>>