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TRANSITIVITY OF PREFERENCE PATTERNS AS SEEN BY PRE‐SCHOOL CHILDREN
Author(s) -
Smedslund Jan
Publication year - 1960
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1960.tb01281.x
Subject(s) - transitive relation , egocentrism , psychology , girl , preference , perception , developmental psychology , social psychology , cognitive psychology , combinatorics , statistics , mathematics , neuroscience
Forty 5–7‐year‐old children were asked to predict the choice of a boy or girl between objects A and C, after they had been shown that the boy (girl) preferred A to B and B to C. The results show an almost complete absence of ability to perform the required transitive inference. The children's predictions were heavily influenced by their own preferences (‘egocentrism’) and by all kinds of irrelevant perceptual features of the situation. Furthermore, the children's own preferences were frequently nontransitive, i.e. of the type A > B, B > C, C > A (> = preferred to). The findings are interpreted within the theoretical framework of Piaget.