Conflict situations present children with two very different challenges. One challenge is to resolve a conflict through active persuasion and negotiation. The second challenge is to mitigate a conflict or the resulting negative interpersonal affect, without disrupting social harmony between the interactors. This article explores differences between boys and girls in their use of these two kinds of strategies. Two groups of 6 five-year-olds and two groups of 6 seven-year-olds were videotaped in twelve I-hr long playgroups. Both direct persuasion attempts and conflict mitigation attempts were coded from the videotapes. Boys were involved in conflict more often than girls. Once within a conflict situation, boys tended to use threat and physical force significantly more often, whereas girls tended to attempt to mitigate the conflict significantly more often, especially when interacting with other girls. These results are discussed in terms of boys and girls having different perspectives with respect to coping with conflict: Boys are more concerned with and more forceful in pursuing their own agendae, and girls are more concerned with maintaining interpersonal harmony.

This reply discusses the measurement of formal, systematic, and metasystematic stages. Recent multidomain studies have shown disparate results and we suggest that these results could be attributed not to actual variations in adult development or the existence or nonexistence of stage, but instead may reflect differences in methodology regarding task, domain, and scoring. Our study indicates that when tested in only one domain--balance beams and extensions of those tasks--participants who performed at the higher stage were also able to perform at the lower stages. These results also coincide with similar studies conducted.

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