ABSTRACT
The aim of this study was to examine whether gender difference mediates the effects of conflict on cognitive change through social interaction. Forty three undergraduate participants were divided into 10 groups and asked to jointly construct a “naïve path model” explaining intuitively the cause of Japanese teenager’s aggression through discussion. They were also asked to personally construct a similar naive model before and after the discussion sessions. These personal models were compared within subjects and the degree of change in the explanation was individually assessed. Coding the transcriptions of all discussion sessions, we counted the frequencies of utterance, for example, counter-arguing, interpreting, and agreeing etc. Examining the relationships between frequencies of something being uttered by others and the degree of change in the explanation, we found that the degree of change in the explanation correlated with the frequency of “being interpreted”, but not with “being counter-argued”. However, only in case of counter-argument, male and female samples showed different types of relationship with the degree of change in explanation. Specifically, whereas females had a negative relationship, males had a positive one. This result indicates that we need to examine effects of personal attributes affecting the interpretation of specific utterances to fully explicate the mechanisms of cognitive change through social interaction.
