Levels of Obedience among U.S. and East African Children on an Experimental Task

Eighteen peri-urban East African (Kikuyu) and twenty suburban middle-class U.S. children aged five to nine were tested for obedience. Within each sample, every child was directed to carry out both a prescriptive and a proscriptive task by his own mother and by another sample child's mother. No differences were found for the proscriptive task (not touching toys), and all but two children in each sample were fully obedient. However, on the prescriptive task (picking up of blocks), a significantly larger proportion of the East African children were fully obedient, and, as a group, they obeyed at a significantly faster rate than the U.S. children. The finding corroborates expectations, based on ethnographic evidence, about the strong compliance training to which sub-Saharan societies subject their children.