Children's Use Of Trait-relevant Behavior To Predicate Consistency In People's Actions

Much of the developmental research has found children understood some traits much better than others. Could there be different subtypes of trait, and if there are, do different subtypes have developmentally distinct pathways? We can glean some relevant information from the literature on trait terms. On the basis of past review and studies, we compared 'Voluntary/Involuntary' subtypes (Kalish, 2002) to the traditional 'Social-intention/Mental-states' subtypes (Yuill, 1992). We expected to explore children's belief on stability in different traits.This research consisted of three experiments. Experiment 1 re-studied the research on Voluntary/Involuntary subtypes (Kalish, 2002) to verify whether this taxonomy is logical. Because of skimble-scamble methodologies in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 took 'brave /timid' trait out of Involuntary subtype and then studied whether children could differentiate emotion-to-emotion task from action-to-action task on this trait. Based on the above two experiments, experiment 3 focused on the question of whether 'brave /timid', intelligence and physical attributes could be put together as a whole type. The three studies employed tongue report in the end. The results were as follow:1. There would be a "concrete-to-abstract shift" in development from the period of preschooler to middle-school children. Children under the age about 7-8 rely on more global and peripheral attributes, whereas older children rely on more abstract and meaningful attributes.2. On the basis of the function and type of traits, children possess different beliefs on different traits. In Voluntary (social-intention) traits, children have the tendency to depend on evaluative attributes of traits to fulfill their behavior prediction, whereas in involuntary traits, children may depend on different strategies to understand the stability of the three subtypes.3. The optimism has found that children's inconsistency primarily is seen with negative traits, not with positive traits. Children may be willing to see positive traits as stable and invariable, whereas they may tend to regard negative traits as changeable and unstable.4. Brave /timid traits have the special attribute of dual-function. Children tend to think that its emotional function is more stable and has more strength than behavioral function.