Conflict behavior in peer context

PhD project

Project duration: 2023 to 2026

Peers play an important role in children's socio-emotional development. Different from interactions with caregivers, peers meet as equals and have a horizontal relationship. During unsupervised peer interactions, children can thus explore and refine their social skills and master challenging situations in increasingly competent ways. One type of social interaction among peers that preschool children are often confronted with are peer conflicts, typically associated with conflicts over resources such as toys or ideas such as different play ideas. In order to resolve these conflicts, especially younger children mostly exhibit self-orientated behavior, that is, they primarily try to satisfy their own needs. As their social-cognitive and social-emotional development progresses, children begin to display other-oriented conflict behavior, that is, they include the perspectives and needs of others and resolve conflicts in the interests of all. In this project, we examine the development of and influences on preschool children’s other- or self-oriented conflict behavior. In doing so, a specific focus is on key correlates of children’s conflict behavior such as their understanding of social situations and the temporal dynamics of dyadic peer conflicts.