VALUES EXPRESSED IN JUDGMENTS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF OTHERS

Three hundred students at each of four levels (grades, 4, 7, 10, 13) were asked to “tell about something a person did that made you like him better,” and about “something a person did that made you like him less.” The values expressed in these incidents were finally classified under six major headings, positive and negative, and each incident was assigned to one of these headings. The percentage of times each value was expressed was then tabulated by grade level, location (type of environment), sex, educational level of father, occupation of father, several measures of social adjustment and acceptance, frequency of church attendance, liking for church attendance, and verbal ability. The dominant impression left by these tables is that relatively few of these background variables made any significant difference. Out of 156 possibilities, 18 differences were found that were significant at the .01 level, 7 at the .02, and 6 at the .05; and of the 31 significant differences, 17 could be interpreted as artifacts of one sort or another, leaving only 14 that had any independent significance, all related to either grade in school (probably chronological age) or to sex. While the apparent uniformity as to types of values expressed was due in part to the coarseness of grouping of these values, the grouping was as fine as could be made reliably in two independent sortings of the same incidents, and without reducing the incidents in each cell to numbers too small to detect significance. Other differences were probably lost by the crudity of measurement of some of the background variables. Still, within the limitations of the present study, the dominant picture that emerges is that children of widely different background, social class, social acceptance, religious background, and the like judge the behavior of their peers by a remarkably uniform set of values.