ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to apply the circumstantial or interpretative methods to the social behaviour of children. It describes some of the behaviour seen in the interactions between the children, and the way the different pieces of behaviour cluster into groups. Nursery school teachers seem to have a policy of noninterference broken only by giving limited guidance and encouragement when asked, or direly needed. Nursery school children do not greet strangers by touching them and most only smile when they know the stranger quite well. One can produce a slender argument that one reason why children show things rather than touching and smiling is that they are partiy motivated to flee from the parent. Correlations and statistical investigations of fixed action patterns give rise to a more objective and accurate picture of the organization of behaviour than the arbitrary categories of motivation in use in everyday life and in the armchair branches of psychology.
