Previous research indicates that children hold negative beliefs about peers with foreign accents, physical disabilities, and people who are obese. The current study examined skills associated with individual differences in children's social judgements about these typically stereotyped groups. Theory of mind, memory, and cognitive inhibition were assessed in 3-to 6-year-olds. Then, children were asked to make trait attributions and behavioural predictions about story characters' willingness to help a peer. Results indicated that better theory of mind skills were related to greater positive trait attributions and behavioural predictions about typically stereotyped characters. Younger children made fewer positive behavioural predictions as compared to older children, but both age groups made positive trait attributions. Overall, memory and inhibition had little to no influence on children's responses, although the results varied by story type.

The present research examined the influence of peer characteristics on children's reactions to upward social comparisons. In Experiment 1, one hundred twenty-six 5-, 8-, and 10-year-olds were told that they were outperformed by an expert or novice peer. Older children reported higher self-evaluations after comparisons with an expert rather than a novice, whereas 5-year-olds reported high self-evaluations broadly. In Experiment 2, ninety-eight 5- to 6-year-olds and 9- to 10-year-olds were told that the peer possessed a positive or negative trait that was task relevant (i.e., intelligence) or task irrelevant (i.e., athleticism). Older children reported higher self-evaluations after hearing about positive rather than negative traits, irrespective of relevance. Younger children reported high self-evaluations indiscriminately. Results inform the understanding of social comparison development in childhood.

Children's attributions about story characters in ambiguous and unambiguous social situations were assessed. One hundred and forty-four 6-7-year-olds and 10-11-year-olds heard about actors who slighted a recipient intentionally or for an undetermined reason and then made causal attributions about the events, an emotion attribution about the recipient, and global personality attributions about the actors and recipient. Relations between perceived self-competence and attribution style were also assessed. Participants were more likely to make negative causal attributions in the unambiguous condition and with increasing age. Older girls and younger boys were more likely than other groups to attribute negative emotions to the recipient. Overall, participants perceived recipients positively and actors negatively. Perceived self-competence was positively correlated with actor attributions, although these differed by age and gender. Implications for children's psychosocial adjustment are discussed.

No abstract

Numerous studies suggest that preverbal infants possess the ability to make sociomoral judgements and demonstrate a preference for prosocial agents. Some theorists argue that infants possess an “innate moral core” that guides their sociomoral reasoning. However, we propose that infants’ capacity for putative sociomoral evaluation and reasoning can just as likely be driven by a domain-general associative-learning mechanism that is sensitive to agent action. We implement this theoretical account in a connectionist computational model and show that it can account for the pattern of results in Hamlin et al. (2007) and Hamlin and Wynn (2011). These are pioneering studies in this area and were among the first studies to examine sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Based on the results of 6 computer simulations, we suggest that a domain-general associative-learning mechanism can account for previous findings on preverbal infants’ capacity for sociomoral evaluation. These results suggest that an innate moral core may not be necessary to account for apparent sociomoral evaluation in infants.