The Effect of Personal Relevance on Psychological Inference: A Developmental Analysis

Abstract

The effect of personal relevance was examined as a motivational alternative to capacity-based explanations of young children's failure to describe others in terms of psychological characteristics. In Study 1, children at 2 age levels (5-6 and 9-10 years) were asked to describe actors exhibiting different behaviors and to select partners for different games. As predicted, children who expected to interact with the actors were much more likely to describe them in psychological terms. Older children selected partners based on instrumental goals, maximizing their own outcomes, whereas younger children selected partners based on liking. The findings were replicated in Study 2, and expecting interaction was also found to affect behavior (toy allocation). The results suggest that the verbal inferencing skills of young children have been underestimated in the past, and that younger children may be more oriented than older children toward affective relative to instrumental goals in anticipating interaction with a peer.

Development of the understanding of character constancy: Expectations of the behavior of friendly and unfriendly peers

“…A previous study (Feldman & Ruble, 1988) has also shown that young children increase their inferential activity when the consequences of the activity are personally relevant. These findings suggest that personal relevance plays an important role in the formation of a theory on personality characteristics.…”

The developmental approach to young children's strategic social cognition and behaviour

“…We believe that the affective bias found in young children by Feldman and Ruble (1988) can be attributed to the fact that the sympathy level induced by the target children video recordings was not controlled. In fact, we do not know if the affective character of each stimulus was identical.…”

“…This paradigm allowed us to discover at what age children are able to make the correct partner choices, namely the choices based on the target ability relevant to the task. These criteria were used by Feldman and Ruble (1988) and Thompson, Boggiano, Costanzo, Matter, and Ruble (1995). For instance, in the Thompson et al (1995) study, children in two age groups (6-7 and 10-11 years) were asked to select partners for different games after video presentations of targets (one who displayed physical coordination and antisocial behaviour, and another who displayed prosocial behaviour but a lack of physical coordination).…”

“…For instance, in the Thompson et al (1995) study, children in two age groups (6-7 and 10-11 years) were asked to select partners for different games after video presentations of targets (one who displayed physical coordination and antisocial behaviour, and another who displayed prosocial behaviour but a lack of physical coordination). In the study of Feldman and Ruble (1988), the videotapes illustrated four different types of behaviour intended to represent dispositional characteristics of the actor: two characteristics involved interpersonal behaviour (prosocial/antisocial) and two involved motor…”

Changing dominance in mixed profession groups: putting theory into practice

“…Therefore, the general dominance at the beginning of the experiment might have been caused by these age-differences. In small children, such age-differences have a significant impact because of differences in age-related mental development (Feldman & Ruble, 1988). These types of age-related developmental differences do not apply to adults and, to a lesser degree, adolescents.…”