Children's thinking about traits: Implications for judgements of the self and others

Two studies provide evidence that a belief in stable traits leads to a focus on judging those traits in oneself and others, and along with this a focus on outcomes and behaviors through which traits can be judged. A total of 202 second graders (7- and 8-year-olds; an age at which major development changes in understanding of the academic and social domains are occurring) were interviewed. For both domains, a belief in sociomoral stability (the notion that one's goodness or badness is stable) was found to be associated with an emphasis on trait evaluation. In the academic domain, emphasis was placed upon the evaluative meanings of performance outcomes, as opposed to learning processes such as effort and strategy generation. Similarly, in the social domain, a belief in sociomoral stability was associated with an emphasis on traits and the evaluative meanings of behaviors, rather than on mediating processes such as context and intention. This pattern of findings suggests that beliefs about the stability of traits serve as important organizing principles for thinking about and functioning within the academic and social domains.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio