Page 370 - The Social Animal

352 The Social Animal

Underlying Mechanisms Why does the jigsaw method pro-
duce such positive results? One reason for its effectiveness is that this
cooperative strategy places people in a favor-doing situation.That is,
each individual in a group, by sharing his or her knowledge with the
other members, is doing them a favor. You will recall that, in Chap-
ter 5, we discussed an experiment by Mike Leippe and Donna Eisen-
stadt 101 that demonstrated that people who acted in a way that
benefited others subsequently came to feel more favorably toward the
people they helped.
A different but complementary mechanism was illustrated in an
experiment by Samuel Gaertner and his colleagues, 102 demonstrat-
ing that what seems to happen is that the process of cooperation low-
ers barriers between groups by changing the cognitive categories
people use. In other words, cooperation changes our tendency to cat-
egorize the outgroup from “those people” to “us people.” But how
does this change from “those people” to “us people” actually come
about? I believe that the mediating process is empathy—the ability
to experience what your group member is experiencing. In the com-
petitive classroom, the primary goal is simply to show the teacher
how smart you are. You don’t have to pay much attention to the other
students. But the jigsaw situation is different. To participate effec-
tively in the jigsaw classroom, each student needs to pay close atten-
tion to whichever member of the group is reciting. In the process, the
participants begin to learn that great results can accrue if each of
their classmates is approached in a way that is tailored to fit his or
her special needs. For example, Alice may learn that Carlos is a bit
shy and needs to be prodded gently, while Phyllis is so talkative that
she might need to be reigned in occasionally. Peter can be joked with,
while Serena responds only to serious suggestions.
If our analysis is sound, then it should follow that working in jig-
saw groups would lead to the sharpening of a youngster’s general em-
pathic ability. To test this notion, Diane Bridgeman 103 conducted a
clever experiment with 10-year-old children. Prior to her experi-
ment, half the children had spent two months participating in jigsaw
classes; the others spent that time in traditional classrooms. In her
experiment, Bridgeman showed the children a series of cartoons
aimed at testing a child’s ability to empathize—to put themselves in
the shoes of the cartoon characters. For example, in one cartoon, the
first panel shows a little boy looking sad as he waves good-bye to his