Age-Related Changes in Children's and Adults' Explanations of Interpersonal Actions

Abstract

We investigated the content of children's and adults' explanations of interpersonal actions. Participants were 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children, as well as adults, who were presented with 8 stories containing either prosocial or antisocial target actions, and asked to explain why each actor performed that action. In half of the stories, an interpersonal event preceded the action. Children and adults provided situational and mental-state explanations, but mental-state explanations were especially common for antisocial actions not preceded by an interpersonal event. With increasing age, participants explained prosocial actions by referring to the actor's goals, but referred to the actor's emotions and beliefs to explain antisocial actions. Finally, adults were most likely to mention psychological goals. These results suggest that (a) elementary school children provide a variety of explanations for interpersonal events; (b) children use different types of explanations flexibly, depending on the context and nature of the target action; (c) the frequency of different types of explanations for interpersonal actions changes during childhood; and (d) between middle childhood and adulthood, the recognition of psychological goals increases greatly.

Attributing motives to others: Children's and adults' explanations of interpersonal events

“…Furthermore, in Experiment 2, younger children usually did not endorse indirect psychological goals even though these goals were explicitly presented. This finding is consistent with previous findings from studies employing open‐ended questions in which young children usually did not generate indirect psychological‐goal explanations (Lovett & Pillow, 2010; Pillow et al, 2008). The relatively late recognition of indirect psychological goals may reflect their greater complexity.…”

“…Although participants' patterns of ratings generally paralleled the results of previous studies using open‐ended questions, there were some discrepancies. In previous studies, when asked to verbally explain interpersonal actions, psychological‐goal explanations were provided by 6‐ to 10‐year‐olds infrequently, but were more frequent among adolescents and adults (Lovett & Pillow, 2010; Pillow et al, 2008). Similarly, in Experiment 1, first graders did not rate psychological goals higher than other explanations, but third graders through adults did (Pillow et al, 2008).…”

“…First, they included bystanders who witnessed the target event. Both Lovett and Pillow (2010) and Pillow et al (2008) reported that although indirect psychological‐goal explanations were generally infrequent as spontaneous explanations of interpersonal actions, these explanations occurred more often when an action (or its aftermath) took place in the presence of a bystander. Therefore, in Experiment 2, participants heard stories in which an interpersonal event (or its aftermath) was witnessed by either a teacher or a group of peers.…”

“…Based both on previous results and the goal‐transparency hypothesis (Lovett & Pillow, 2010; Pillow et al, 2008), we expected that younger children would rate instrumental‐goal explanations relatively high, but rate psychological, social, and indirect explanations relatively low, whereas older children, adolescents, and adults would rate psychological and social goals higher than instrumental goals and might also rate indirect goals higher than instrumental goals.…”

“…Previous explanation studies presented children with brief vignettes and asked them to either (a) provide verbal responses to open‐ended questions about why the actor behaved as s/he did (Banerjee & Yuill, 1999; Bennett & Yeeles, 1990a, 1990b; Lovett & Pillow, 2010; Pillow et al, 2008; Watling & Banerjee, 2007a) or (b) verbally explain why they rated the actor as nice/mean (Heyman et al, 2013, 2016) or his behaviour as good/bad (Watling & Banerjee, 2007b). Use of a rating‐scale procedure allowed us to seek converging evidence for age‐related changes in children's explanations with an alternative method.…”