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Components of Young Children’s Trait Understanding: Behavior‐to‐Trait Inferences and Trait‐to‐Behavior Predictions
Author(s) -
Liu David,
Gelman Susan A.,
Wellman Henry M.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01082.x
Subject(s) - trait , psychology , attribution , developmental psychology , cognition , cognitive psychology , component (thermodynamics) , social psychology , physics , neuroscience , computer science , thermodynamics , programming language
Trait attribution is central to people’s naïve theories of people and their actions. Previous developmental research indicates that young children are poor at predicting behaviors from past trait‐relevant behaviors. We propose that the cognitive process of behavior‐to‐behavior predictions consists of two component processes: (1) behavior‐to‐trait inferences and (2) trait‐to‐behavior predictions. Experiment 1 demonstrates that 4‐, 5‐, 7‐, and 9‐year‐olds can infer trait labels from behaviors. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 4‐, 5‐, and 7‐year‐olds can predict behaviors from trait labels but not from past behaviors. Experiment 3 demonstrates that 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds understand traits as predictive and stable over time. Taken together, these three studies show that young children, in possessing component trait‐reasoning processes, have a nascent understanding of traits.