Hagá, Garcia-Marques & Olson (2014)

Too Young to Correct: A Developmental Test of the Three-StageModel of Social Inference

Sara Hagá and Leonel Garcia-MarquesUniversidade de Lisboa

Kristina R. OlsonUniversity of Washington

The 3-stage model of social inference posits that people categorize behaviors and characterize actors orsituations effortlessly, but they correct these characterizations with additional information effortfully.The current article tests this model using developmental data, assuming that the less cognitivelydemanding processes in the model (i.e., categorization, characterization) should appear earlier indevelopment, whereas the more demanding correction process should not appear until later in develop-ment. Using 2 different paradigms, Studies 1 and 3 found that younger children failed to take situationalinformation into account while characterizing the actor. Study 2 found that younger children failed to takedispositional information into account while characterizing the situation. In contrast, in these 3 studies,older children used the available information to correct their characterizations of the actors and of thesituations. Consistent with the 3-stage model, during elementary school years, children start to integrateadditional information when drawing explicit social inferences. In Study 4, children of all age levels useda prior expectancy to draw a dispositional inference, ignoring situational information, suggesting thatcharacterizations based on prior expectancies about an actor are a highly efficient process, not contem-plated by the model. The 4 studies together illustrate how developmental data can be valuably used totest adult socio-cognitive models, to extend their validity, or to simply further inform those models.

Keywords: person perception, dispositional inference, social inference, development, dual-process model

Before you criticize someone you should walk a mile in their shoes.That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you havetheir shoes.

—Lawrence Dorfman, The Snark Handbook: A ReferenceGuide to Verbal Sparring

Popular wisdom states that you should walk a mile in anotherperson’s shoes before judging them, meaning that you should takeinto account, not only what the other person did, but also thecircumstances in which the other person was placed. Consistentwith this view, early attribution theorists, like Heider (1958),argued that people judge others based on their behavior if thisbehavior was intentional. If instead the behavior was performedbecause circumstances compelled the actor to do so, a dispositionalinference should not be made (see also Heider, 1944; Jones &Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1973).

However logical this argument might be, it does not appear to bewhat people actually do. In several studies, Jones and Harris(1967) found that participants consistently inferred dispositions(e.g., an essay writer’s true attitude toward Fidel Castro’s regime)from the actor’s behavior (e.g., the essay), even when the actor hadnot chosen to perform that behavior (e.g., it was the debate coachwho assigned the writer the position to be defended). This effecthas been replicated numerous times, in a variety of paradigms, andhas been termed the correspondence bias (see, e.g., Gawronski,2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones, 1979). The correspondencebias thus refers to the tendency to draw inferences about people’sdispositions, such as attitudes or traits, from their behavior, evenwhen their behavior could be explained by the circumstances, andeven when observers view the circumstances as the cause of thebehavior. In other words, dispositional inference does not follow,at least entirely, from causal attribution (e.g., Hamilton, 1998; E.Smith & Miller, 1983), as assumed by early attribution theorists.The three-stage model of social inference, proposed by Gilbert,Pelham, and Krull (1988), further expanded upon these ideas,providing a unified framework to explain the drawing of disposi-tional inferences and the application of attributional reasoning.

The Three-Stage Model of Social Inference

The three-stage model is easiest to understand through a con-crete example such as the attitude attribution study, in whichparticipants are assigned to write, for example, pro-Castro essays.The model proposes that a social perceiver will first automaticallycategorize the observed behavior for example, as an essay thatfavors Castro’s regime. Then, the model predicts, people will

This article was published Online First August 11, 2014.Sara Hagá and Leonel Garcia-Marques, Faculdade de Psicologia, Uni-

versidade de Lisboa; Kristina R. Olson, Department of Psychology, Uni-versity of Washington.

This research was supported by individual grants awarded by Fundaçãopara a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) to Sara Hagá, and it was conducted aspart of Sara Hagá’s doctoral dissertation. We thank the students, parents,and staff of the Escola Salesiana do Estoril for collaborating in thisresearch. We also thank Rui S. Costa and Rita Ricot for their assistancewith the studies.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to SaraHagá, Faculdade de Psicologia, Alameda da Universidade, 1649-013 Lis-boa, Portugal. E-mail: [email protected]

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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology © 2014 American Psychological Association2014, Vol. 107, No. 6, 994–1012 0022-3514/14/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000012

994

mailto:[email protected]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000012

(fairly automatically) characterize the actor of the behavior with acorrespondent inference or in this case determine that the author isin favor of Castro’s regime. Those two stages are the dispositionalinference part of the model and they align with the correspondencebias. Only then, according to the three-stage model, will theperceiver engage in an effortful correction of the previously drawninference about the actor—recognizing for example that the as-signment was to write a pro-Castro essay, so maybe the actor doesnot personally favor Castro’s regime. This last stage is whereattributional reasoning comes in. The three stages are thus asfollows: categorization, characterization, and correction. Thismodel explains the correspondence bias by positing that peoplefrequently do not complete the attributional reasoning—the cor-rection stage—because it demands more cognitive resources thandispositional inference—the characterization stage.

Perhaps the most famous test of the three-stage model was astudy that employed the silent interview paradigm (Snyder &Frankel, 1976), informally known as the “anxious woman study”(Gilbert et al., 1988, Study 1). In this study, participants watcheda video of a woman being interviewed, but they could not hear heranswers. Thus, participants were able to categorize her behavior bylooking at the facial expression of the interviewee (e.g., she’sbehaving nervously). Participants were asked to characterize thewoman (i.e., what she is usually like). Two variables were manip-ulated in the study. The first variable was the situational informa-tion provided by subtitles: Half of the participants read that thewoman was answering questions related to anxiety-inducing topics(e.g., a public humiliation episode), whereas the other half readthat the woman was talking about relaxing topics (e.g., worldtravel). The three-stage model suggested that in the anxious topicscondition participants should correct their inferences about thewoman’s tendency to be anxious—after all, the topics would beenough to make any interviewee nervous—but in the relaxingtopics condition, correction should not be employed. The secondmanipulated variable was the availability of cognitive resourcesfor the correction operation. Half of the participants were merelyreading the topics as they appeared in the subtitles, thus grantingthem free cognitive resources to devote for the three operationsinvolved in the person perception task. However, the other half ofthe participants were trying to memorize those same topics forlater recall—a task that taxed their cognitive resources but insuredthat the situational information was attended to. Consistent withthe prediction that the correction operation is the most vulnerableto disruption, because it is the last and the most cognitive demand-ing of the three operations, participants in the memorization con-dition (or under cognitive overload) did not consistently use thesituational information they had (namely, the conversation topicsthey knew by heart) to correct their characterization of the woman.

Since the first formulation of the three-stage model of socialinference (Gilbert et al., 1988), some aspects of the model havebeen revised. For instance, Krull (1993) demonstrated that themodel also applies to situation perception. For example, if aperceiver is trying to assess how anxiety provoking a given situ-ation is, this perceiver will make a correspondent inference fromthe behavior (e.g., judging the situation as anxiety provoking if theobserved behavior is anxious) and only then take into accountother information that might be available, like dispositional infor-mation about the actor (e.g., that the actor is usually a nervousperson; see also Krull & Erickson, 1995).

The revision of the three-stage model to its more flexible ver-sion, encompassing both dispositional and situational character-izations, was also useful for understanding how some knowncultural differences (e.g., members of collectivist cultures tend tofocus more on situational determinants of behavior than membersof individualistic cultures; Markus & Kitayama, 1991) and someindividual differences (e.g., people who believe that personality isa rather fixed entity tend to focus more on dispositional determi-nants of behavior than people who believe that personality ismalleable; Molden & Dweck, 2006) may influence the socialinference process. Studies, using either the attitude attributionparadigm or the silent interview paradigm, that compared peoplewith different cultural backgrounds (e.g., Choi & Nisbett, 1998;Krull et al., 1999; Lieberman, Jarcho, & Obayashi, 2005), differentviews on the malleability of personality (e.g., Molden, Plaks, &Dweck, 2006), and different momentary expectations (e.g., Lee &Hallahan, 2001) generally supported the three-stage model ofsocial inference.

Two other important aspects of the model were revised after itsoriginal formulation: the conceptualization of automaticity andsequential operation of the processes (Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert,& Trope, 2002). According to this update of the model, whichestablishes its probable neuroanatomical underpinnings, the auto-matic categorization and characterization processes are not justmore efficient and less deliberate processes than the correctionprocess, but have an altogether different nature, being carried outby a “reflexive” system, most plausibly represented by connec-tionist assumptions. The corrective process, on the other hand,would be carried out by a “reflective” system operating when theinput information is not easily matched to a pattern of activationof the reflexive system or when the perceiver’s goal is noteasily attained. According to this update of the model, the“three-stages” are no longer performed sequentially, but cate-gorization and characterization occur in parallel and recurrently(i.e., both processes are running at the same time and mutuallyaffect the progress of each other, by parallel constraint satis-faction). Correction is still assumed to operate after categori-zation and characterization have been put in motion, but thetheory no longer assumes that correction operates upon the finaloutputs of these operations, since the reflexive system is nowassumed to continually produce patterns of activations. In sum,despite considerably more research on the topic and a fewupdates, the three-stage model has largely remained the same,becoming a well-established model in the “adult” person per-ception literature.

Developmental Tests of Social Cognitive Models

The three-stage model has been built and tested to explain thebehavior of adults, and has been highly successful in doing so.However, here we propose that one important piece of evidence—one that could broaden, or call into question, the scope of themodel’s validity—is still missing. That evidence is whether thebehavior of person perceivers across development is consistentwith the predictions one might derive from the three-stage model.

More generally, we use the three-stage model of person percep-tion as a case study of what we and others believe could be aworthwhile use of developmental methods—using them to testpredictions of social psychological theories, and especially multi-

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995DEVELOPMENTAL TEST OF THE SOCIAL INFERENCE MODEL

process models such as the dual-process models popular in socialcognition research (e.g., Olson & Dunham, 2010; Pomerantz &Newman, 2000; Ruble & Goodnow, 1998). Dual-process models,in particular, may be well assessed with developmental data be-cause they theorize the co-existence of cognitively simpler oroverlearned, less demanding, more automatic processes on the onehand, and more complex, cognitively demanding, and more delib-erate processes, on the other hand. Presumably the former pro-cesses should emerge earlier in development than the latter, pro-viding a clear developmental prediction. This prediction isespecially relevant to models like the three-stage model, whichargues that the more deliberate process will somehow adjust theoutput of the more automatic processes. In such cases, it would behighly improbable that the corrective process has an earlier onsetthan the more automatic ones, or it would not have anything tocorrect. In the present domain, children should be able to catego-rize behaviors and characterize actors or situations (more auto-matic processes) before they can use additional information tocorrect their inferences about the actor’s dispositions or about thesituation (more deliberate process).

By specifying this ontogenetic prediction, we do not intend toargue that automatic processes in adults are necessarily operatingand automatic in children. Some automatized behaviors for adults(e.g., driving a car, tying shoe laces) started out as demanding andcontrolled behaviors, requiring many instances of practice beforethey become automatic. Particularly in the case of the three-stagemodel, we are not assuming that either the categorization of abehavior or the characterization of a person (or situation) usingtrait concepts is automatic and effortless even for young children.The developmental literature (reviewed in more detail in the nextsection) suggests that young children are not proficient at drawingdispositional inferences, and instead are much more inclined todraw situational inferences. If this is the case, then characterizingpeople might be a demanding and effortful process for children.However, if the three-stage model is correct, and correction is amore deliberate process in adults, is hard to imagine it being moreautomatic than the other two processes in children. Instead, cor-rection is likely to be even more effortful or not present at all inchildren. Moreover, because limitations on cognitive resourcesselectively impair the more demanding operations, then youngerchildren should have more difficulty with the correction (andmaybe characterization) stage than older children, adolescents andadults. For example, when an observed behavior is not easilycategorized, adults fail more at correcting their characterizations ofan actor (Gilbert, McNulty, Giuliano, & Benson, 1992). Thisfinding was interpreted as evidence that when categorization andcharacterization are less efficient (as they might be in youngerchildren), correction is the most disrupted operation, because it isthe most demanding operation of the three. Going back to ourdevelopmental prediction, this would mean that only after childrenhave automatized categorization and characterization would theybe able to deploy the necessary cognitive resources to becomeadequate correctors.

Developmental Evidence of Social Inference

To our knowledge, no single developmental study to date hasinvestigated the three stages of this model. However, some devel-opmental studies speak to these processes individually.

Regarding the categorization of behaviors using trait labels,there is considerable evidence that children as young as 4 years ofage already have a reasonable trait vocabulary (Rholes, Newman,& Ruble, 1990) and that they know how to apply it when con-fronted with trait-implying behaviors (e.g., Liu, Gelman, & Well-man, 2007; Rholes & Ruble, 1984). More debate exists regardingchildren’s ability to engage in the characterization stage of themodel. On the one hand, preschoolers have been successful atlabeling actors with personality traits that were implied by theirbehaviors (e.g., as an answer to “Is Bobby selfish?”; Liu et al.,2007), which according to the three-stage model of person percep-tion would be an indication that even children as young as 4 yearsof age are able to characterize an actor in trait terms. On the otherhand, however, this accurate “labeling” is rarely taken as evidenceof dispositional inference in the developmental literature. Re-searchers usually refrain from concluding that children drew adispositional inference unless they predict trait consistent behavioracross situations or time for an actor, often finding that youngerchildren do not do so (e.g., Newman, 1991; Rholes & Ruble,1984). This distinction between mere trait inferences and full-blown dispositional inferences that include consonant behavioralpredictions may be at the heart of the debate about when youngchildren start to make dispositional inferences.

Finally, concerning the correction operation, developmental ev-idence suggests that 5-year-olds do not reliably discount the influ-ence of a given factor, when other factors are plausible causes fora behavior (i.e., do not apply the discounting principle; Kelley,1973). For instance, a majority of kindergartners inferred that a kidwho shared a toy after being promised a reward for sharing was infact kinder than a kid who voluntarily shared (Baldwin & Baldwin,1970; see also Karniol & Ross, 1976; M. C. Smith, 1975), andyoung elementary scholars tend to conflate, instead of differenti-ate, effort and ability to explain a successful outcome (e.g., Folmeret al., 2008; Nicholls, 1978; Nicholls & Miller, 1984). The three-stage model does not specify which attributional rules are suppos-edly applied during the correction stage, but it supposes that thediscounting principle should be one of those rules. Thus, theevidence regarding the application of the discounting principleseems to be consistent with a rather late onset of the correctionoperation in person perception, which would corroborate the three-stage model.

In spite of the evidence that preschoolers can accurately drawtrait inferences from behaviors (e.g., Liu et al., 2007) and that firstgraders can make consensual and well calibrated trait-ratings re-garding their classmates (e.g., Malloy, Yarlas, Montvilo, & Sug-arman, 1996), a common perspective in the developmental litera-ture is that young children, until about 7 years of age, areessentially situationists (i.e., they will explain and predict others’behavior in terms of situational factors), whereas older children aredispositionalists (i.e., they will apply dispositional determinants ofbehavior, such as personality traits, in a rather strict and rigid way),and then in adolescence they transition to a more interactionistapproach, whereby they use both situational and dispositionalinformation in their perceptions of others (e.g., Livesley & Bro-mley, 1973; Pomerantz & Newman, 2000; Rholes et al., 1990;Ross, 1981; Ruble & Dweck, 1995). This developmental trajectorywas traced pulling together evidence from a variety of tasks.Developmental studies on person perception differ in many im-portant ways (e.g., some involve describing real people, some

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996 HAGÁ, GARCIA-MARQUES, AND OLSON

answering why someone behaved in a given way; Livesley &Bromley, 1973; Miller, 1984) and also differ considerably fromadult dispositional inference studies (i.e., adults studies typicallydepend on trait ratings). These differences make conclusions aboutwhether developmental data are consistent with the three-stagemodel or not difficult to draw. The current research seeks to fill inthis gap by investigating the relative contributions of behavioral,situational, and dispositional information to social inference, atdifferent ages, but within a single method.

The Current Studies

In the current studies, we tested the hypothesis that only olderchildren, in contrast to younger children, would use additionalavailable information to correct their inferences about an actor ora situation. In other words, young children, lacking full operationof the more demanding correction process, should be even moresusceptible to the correspondence bias than adults. We did notconstrain this hypothesis to specific age groups, since the focalaspect of our prediction lies in the comparison between youngerand older children and not in a particular age window. Instead, weincluded a wide range of ages (i.e., from kindergarteners to un-dergraduates), which allows for testing processes that develop overtime and whose expression might vary depending on the particularmethodology, and allowing for the inspection of non-linear differ-ences with age. In Study 1, participants had information about anactor’s behavior and about the situation, and were asked to inferthe actor’s trait. In Study 2, participants were asked to infer thesituation the actor was placed in, and the additional informationprovided to participants was about the actor, instead of the situa-tion. In Study 3, participants were again given information aboutthe actor’s behavior and situation, but this time, were asked toinfer the actor’s attitude. In all these studies, for half of theparticipants the additional information alone could explain thebehavior, and should thus be used to correct characterizations.Finally, in Study 4, we switched from testing the predictionderived from the model to explore a place where the modelmight be in need of some conceptual refinement, namely re-garding the link between prior expectancies and characteriza-tion. In this study, besides the actor’s behavior and situation,participants also had information that allowed them to form aprior expectancy about the actor’s attitude.

Study 1—The Sad Child

Adults often form impressions of strangers very quickly—usingboth their behavior and the context (even if they tend to over-relyon the former) to figure out what they are like. For example, if onesees a man crying in front of a tombstone one might form adifferent impression than a man crying in front of a pizza parlor.In this study, we investigate when children at different ages usethese two types of information in their impression formation.

In Study 1, we adapted the silent interview paradigm (Snyder &Frankel, 1976), used by Gilbert et al. (1988) to test the three-stagemodel. First, participants watched a silent video of a target-childtalking while displaying a sad expression [behavioral informa-tion]. Participants learned that the target was either talking about atime when s/he got a gift or a time when s/he was punished[situational information]. After watching the video, participants

rated how dispositionally sad they thought the target was [dispo-sitional ratings] and how much sadness the conversation topicwould normally induce [understanding situational constraints].

Method

Participants. Participants in this study were 30 kindergarten-ers (63% girls, M � 5 years and 4 months, SD � 3 months), 30second graders (53% girls, M � 7 years and 11 months, SD � 4months), 30 sixth graders (30% girls, M � 11 years and 5 months,SD � 4 months), and 32 ninth graders (63% girls, M � 14 yearsand 6 months, SD � 4 months), who were recruited and tested ata private school in the metropolitan area of Lisbon, Portugal, afterreceiving parental and school authorization and providing theirown assent. Thirty undergraduates (50% women, M � 21 years,SD � 2 years) were recruited and tested at the University ofLisbon, Portugal.1

Procedure. Participants were told they were about to watch ashort film featuring a child (Anna/John) speaking. Participantswere forewarned that the video had no sound, but that they wouldnot need to know exactly what the target had been saying—itwould be enough to know that the target was talking about a timewhen his/her parents got mad at him/her and punished him/her[punishment condition] or a time when the child’s parents werepleased with him/her and gave him/her a gift [gift condition].Before the video was played, participants were prompted to statethe topic of the target’s conversation in order to ensure that allparticipants remembered the situational information, upon watch-ing the video.

The video consisted of a 30-s close up of a target-child of theparticipant’s gender speaking with a sad facial expression. The twoversions (female and male) of the video were pre-tested with adifferent group of 10 participants at each grade level. The resultsof this pretest revealed that children at all grade levels categorizedthe targets’ expression as sad (i.e., the 95% confidence intervals[CIs] of the mean ratings did not include the midpoint of a 5-pointpictorial scale and there were no differences by age). After watch-ing the video, participants provided answers, which were recordedby the experimenter on the dependent measures (see next section).

Measures.Dispositional ratings. Three items composed the dispositional

ratings measure (analogous to the perceived trait measure inGilbert et al., 1988). Participants were asked “What do you think[Anna] is usually like, in her day-to-day life, when she is at homeor at school?” and provided their ratings on three different 5-pointpictorial scales. The first scale was anchored by the labels verysad–very happy, and the pictorial labels varied from a frowningface with two tears to an open-wide smiley face. The second scalewas anchored by the labels is always crying–never cries, and thepictorial labels ranged from a frowning face with six tears to a

1 We decided to collect 15 participants per cell before conducting allstudies, except for Study 3b, where we included all participants of thepre-defined age groups that were run by the experimenters, who werecompleting a research assignment. On some occasions, due to an experi-menter’s mistake, extra participants were run. This never occurred morethan one time per cell, and analyses excluding these “last” participantsyield the same results. Moreover, we report all data exclusions (if any), allmanipulations, and all measures in the study (in line with recommendationsby Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011).

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neutral face. Finally, the third scale was anchored by the labelsnever laughs–is always laughing, and the pictorial labels variedfrom a neutral face to a wide-open smiley face.

The internal consistency of a composite of these three scales,given by Cronbach’s alpha, was heightened for all grade levelswith the exclusion of the second rating scale. We think this effectmay be linked with the social norm “boys don’t cry,” since thesecond scale worked particularly poorly for male participants.With the exclusion of this scale, the value of the overall Cron-bach’s alpha raised to � � .72 (ranging from � � .42 for kinder-gartners2 to � � .85 for second graders), which is an acceptablereliability for a scale involving only two items.

Understanding situational constraints. The two final ques-tions aimed at verifying whether participants at all grade levelsunderstood how the situational information would constrain thetarget’s behavior. Participants were told that these two questionswere not about the target, but about themselves. The questionswere phrased as follows “How would you feel if you were talkingabout a time when your parents got mad at you and punished you?”and “How would you feel if you were talking about a time whenyour parents were pleased with you and offered you a gift?”—except for adults, for whom the questions read “How would anaverage/typical child feel if . . . .” The 5-point pictorial scales wereanchored by the phrases very sad (frowning face with two tears)and very happy (wide-open smiley face).3

Results

Preliminary analyses did not reveal any significant effect orinteraction for gender and, thus, this variable was excluded fromthe reported analysis. In order to test the focal hypothesis (i.e., thatyounger children’s dispositional ratings will be similar acrossconditions, while older participants’ ratings will differ according tocondition) and the validity of the paradigm adaptation (i.e., tocheck for a replication of previous findings with adults), a 5 (gradelevel) � 2 (condition) analysis of variance (ANOVA) was con-ducted on the dispositional ratings, and planned contrasts betweenconditions were computed per grade level.4

Dispositional ratings. The ANOVA revealed a main effect ofgrade level on the dispositional ratings about the target, F(4,142) � 8.09, MSE � 0.80, p � .001, �p

2 � .186. Although ourhypothesis did not refer to any of the possible main effects, theinspection of the means suggests that participants’ ratings of thetarget’s dispositional sadness increased with grade level. Therewas also a main effect of condition, F(1, 142) � 10.81, p � .001,�p

2 � .071, with the target-child in the gift condition being per-ceived, on average, as dispositionally sadder than in the punish-ment condition. More importantly, as predicted, the two factorsinteracted significantly, F(4, 142) � 2.61, p � .038, �p

2 � .068 (seeFigure 1). Since we did not have a specific prediction of the age atwhich correction would be fully operating, we probed this fourdegree of freedom overall interaction with four more focusedinteraction contrasts (i.e., with only one degree of freedom). Thefirst of these contrasts compared kindergarteners’ to all oldergroups’ ratings. The second contrast compared the two youngergroups’ to the three older groups’ ratings, the third contrast op-posed the three younger groups’ to the two older groups’ ratings,and the fourth contrast all younger groups’ to the undergraduates’ratings. The first two interaction contrasts were statistically sig-

nificant, t(142) � 3.12, p � .002, Cohen’s d � 0.52, and t(142) �2.21, p � .029, Cohen’s d � 0.37, respectively, whereas the thirdcontrast was marginally significant, t(142) � 1.97, p � .051,Cohen’s d � 0.33. The contrast opposing all younger groups to theundergraduates was not statistically significant, t(142) � 1.45, p �.148, Cohen’s d � 0.24. These results support the interpretationthat younger children’s ratings (in this case more markedly kin-dergarteners’ ratings) differ from older children’s and adults’ rat-ings.

In the next step, we directly tested our hypothesis performing acontrast analysis for each age group. The planned contrast testing

2 Because an alpha of .42 for kindergarteners is fairly low, we inspectedthe results of the two items separately. The means and 95% CIs percondition in both items are very similar, and the difference between themeans of the two conditions is in the same direction and similar inmagnitude.

3 There was one other task in the study, where participants providedbehavioral predictions regarding three sadness-inducing situations (e.g.,“How would Anna feel if she lost a toy that she loved”). This task wasincluded in order to mirror Gilbert et al.’s (1988, Study 1) predicted statemeasure. However, behavioral prediction may involve other processesbeyond dispositional inference (namely, participants may simulate whatthey themselves would feel and integrate the disposition they inferred forthe actor), and thus we did not expect this measure to exactly mirror thedispositional ratings measure. The internal consistency of a compound ofthe three items was not high (overall Cronbach’s � � .65) and could notbe improved with the exclusion of a single item. We opted for not includinga report of this measure in the main text to not deviate from the focal pointof dispositional inference. Briefly, results in this measure showed a grade-level effect, with younger participants predicting higher levels of sadness,and a gender effect with female participants predicting higher levels ofsadness for the female target (participant’s and target’s genders werematched). The difference between conditions for undergraduates was sig-nificant, t(132) � 2.10, p � .019, as in the dispositional ratings measureand in the original study (Gilbert et al., 1988). For the other grade levels,the pattern of means was consistent with the results on the dispositionalratings measure, but the differences were not significant, except for theundergraduates, as mentioned, and for the sixth graders, t(132) � 1.77, p �.040. Surprisingly, the results of the ninth graders, a group in between sixthgraders and undergraduates, did not attain significance, t � 1.

4 Variances across grade levels were not homogeneous for any of thestudies, except Study 4. Similar ANOVAs conducted on rank-transformeddata (Conover & Iman, 1981) yielded identical results to the ANOVAscalculated with raw data for each one of the studies.

Figure 1. Mean values for the perceived dispositional sadness of thetarget across grade levels in the two experimental conditions of Study 1.Error bars represent the standard error of the mean.

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whether undergraduates inferred that the sad-looking child talkingabout a gift was dispositionally sadder than the same child talkingabout a punishment (for the topic of punishment could account forthe child’s sad expression) was statistically significant, t(142) �2.76, MSE � 0.80, p � .003, one-tailed, �p

2 � .051. This result, byreplicating Gilbert et al.’s (1988, Study 1) result, validates ouradaptation of the paradigm.

As predicted, kindergarteners’ ratings did not differ betweenconditions, t(142) � 1, one-tailed, �p

2 � .012, which is consistentwith the assumption that kindergartners did not correct their dis-positional inferences according to the situational information. Allother grade levels perceived the target as being a sadder childwhen the situational information could not have contributed to thesad expression, namely, when the target was believed to be talkingabout a gift rather than about a punishment: second grade, t(142) �1.84, p � .034, �p

2 � .023; sixth grade, t(142) � 1.74, p � .042,�p

2 � .021; ninth grade, t(142) � 2.37, p � .009, �p2 � .038; all

one-tailed, MSE � 0.80.5

Moreover, if participants were performing a situational correc-tion, then their dispositional ratings should be close to the midpointof the scale in the punishment condition, indicating that theydiscounted their dispositional inferences when the behavior couldhave been situationally determined. Consistent with this reasoning,the three older groups did not perceive the sad-looking targettalking about a sad topic as being dispositionally either a sad or ahappy child, all ts � 1. The two younger groups’ ratings in thepunishment condition differed significantly from the midpoint ofthe scale—kindergarten, t(142) � 2.17, MSE � 0.80, p � .032,�p

2 � .032; second grade, t(142) � 2.89, p � .004, �p2 � .056—but

surprisingly not because they were correspondent with the behav-ior (i.e., in the “sad side” of the scale), but because they lay on the“happy side” of the scale. This unexpected result will be discussedfurther below.

Understanding situational constraints. As a manipulationcheck, we assessed whether participants realized that talking aboutgetting a gift would normally lead a person to be happy, whereastalking about being punished would normally make a person sad.This was especially important to confirm in kindergartners to becertain that their results above (i.e., not using the situationalinformation) were not driven by simply misunderstanding theeffects of these situations on mood. At all grade levels, participantsstated that talking about a punishment would make them sad andthat talking about a gift would make them happy (none of the 95%CIs for the mean values included the midpoint of the scale). Mostcritically, kindergartners clearly considered the punishment topicas sadness-inducing (M � 1.87, 95% CI [1.36, 2.27]) and the gifttopic as happiness-inducing (M � 4.93, 95% CI [4.84, 5.03]).

Discussion

The obtained results corroborate the developmental predictionderived from the three-stage social inference model, which statesthat the situational correction process would have an ontogeneti-cally later onset than the dispositional characterization process.Participants of all age groups, except 5-year-olds, characterized thesad-looking child as being dispositionally sadder when the situa-tion could not account for the sad behavior (i.e., in the giftcondition) than when the situation could have induced the sadness(i.e., punishment condition). In other words, there is no evidence

that 5-year-olds used the situational information to correct theircharacterizations of the actor, while there is evidence of the cor-rective operation in older children’s results. Moreover, it is un-likely that 5-year-olds avoided the situational information simplybecause they failed to appreciate the impact that the conversationtopics would have on the actor’s feelings. On the contrary, thesechildren recognized that speaking about a gift or a punishmentwould be enough to produce a happy or a sad emotional state,respectively, as much as children of other age groups did. Theseresults, in turn, speak for the validity of the three-stage model, notonly as an end-state model of human cognition, but also as a modelwith developmental applicability.

However, as noted above, there was an unexpected result—namely, younger children’s overall characterization of the target.While this unpredicted result does not speak to our focal hypoth-eses, it seems to be inconsistent with one of the assumptions of themodel. The three-stage social inference model posits that theobserver will characterize the actor in correspondence with howthe behavior was categorized, which means that if participantscategorized the target’s behavior as sad, then they should infer thatthe actor is dispositionally sad or, at least, not happy. Five-year-olds characterized the target in both conditions as a happy childand 7-year-olds made the same inference in the punishment con-dition.

A number of explanations could account for this result. Forinstance, one could wonder whether younger children failed tocategorize the behavior as sad or whether younger children merelyused the rating scales differently from older children. Speakingagainst these possibilities, 5- and 7-year-olds categorized the tar-get’s expression as sad in the material pretest and used the ratingscale identically to older participants both in the pretest and in theunderstanding situational constraints measure, thus ruling out theseexplanations as probable.

Other possible explanations for the non-correspondence be-tween behavioral categorization and dispositional characterizationin younger children’s results are that younger children engaged ina positivity bias in rating others (e.g., Newman, 1991; Rholes &Ruble, 1984, 1986), that younger children did not base theircharacterizations of the actor solely on the observed behavior (butalso on their prior expectancy that children are usually happy, forexample), and that younger children were not making dispositionalcharacterizations at all. We do not consider this last explanation tobe highly likely. For one thing there is evidence that youngerchildren can make accurate trait inferences from behavior ofhypothetical targets (e.g., Liu et al., 2007) and consensual charac-terizations of peers, well calibrated with teachers’ characteriza-tions (e.g., Malloy et al., 1996). Moreover, in the present study, ifyounger children were not making a dispositional characterizationof the actor, one would expect that their ratings would spreadrandomly through the 5 points of the scale. However, the youngerchildren’s ratings were skewed to the positive end of the scale.

Still, as reviewed in the introduction of this article, the devel-opmental literature suggests that younger children are more in-

5 All presented p values are one-tailed because in the present case aone-tailed test is a more stringent test of our hypothesis, given that the partof our hypothesis that refers to young children is a null hypothesis and thatthe part of our hypothesis that refers to older children, as well as adults, isa directional hypothesis.

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clined and experienced at drawing situational inferences (e.g.,Rholes et al., 1990). If the three-stage model of social inference iscorrect, then the differential results between younger and olderparticipants regarding the use of additional information to adjustcharacterizations should hold, even in the case when a situational(and not a dispositional) characterization is asked for. Moreover, ifcharacterizing the situation is indeed an easier task for youngerchildren, then reversing the paradigm (e.g., as in Krull, 1993)should reduce cognitive demands for younger children, providinga more fair test of whether they will be able to correct theircharacterizations with additional information (in this case dispo-sitional information). In Study 2, following other studies in adultliterature that also looked into situational characterizations pro-duced by participants with different cultural background (Krull etal., 1999), different beliefs in how traits and context interplay toproduce behavior (Molden et al., 2006), and different epistemicgoals (Krull, 1993), we gave participants information about thebehavior of the actor and about the actor’s dispositions, and askedthem to characterize the situation in which the actor was placed.

Study 2—The Sad Story

Sometimes we are interested in forming an impression of asituation, like whether a movie is funny. In those cases, we use thebehaviors we are observing, but also other information we mighthave about the people, to figure out what the situation is like. Forexample, if one sees a usually serious colleague laughing whilecoming out of the cinema, one might infer that movie was funnierthan if the laughing person was a usually hilarious colleague. Thedevelopmental literature suggests that younger children are moreinclined to draw situational than dispositional inferences (e.g.,Rholes et al., 1990). If this is the case, then in the present study,where the goal is to make a situational characterization, presum-ably matching younger children’s tendency to draw situationalinferences, we would expect that even the youngest children wouldcharacterize the situation in line with the observed behavior. Onlyolder children, however, would be able to go one step further anduse the information about the actor to modulate their characteriza-tions of the situation.

In Study 2, we again used the silent interview paradigm to testthe three-stage model. However, in contrast to Study 1, we gaveparticipants information about the actor’s dispositions and askedthem to characterize the situation. First, participants watched asilent video of a target-child talking while displaying a sad expres-sion [behavioral information]. Participants learned that the targetwas either known at school for crying frequently or for laughingfrequently [dispositional information]. After watching the video,participants rated how sad or happy they thought the question thatthe target was answering was [situational ratings] and how sad orhappy the target usually is in her/his daily life [understandingdispositional information].

Method

Participants. A new set of 30 kindergarteners (53% boys,M � 5 years and 9 months, SD � 3 months), 30 second graders(53% boys, M � 7 years and 10 months, SD � 4 months), 30 sixthgraders (40% boys, M � 11 years and 10 months, SD � 5 months),and 30 ninth graders (57% boys, M � 14 years and 9 months,

SD � 4 months) participated in this study. Children and adoles-cents were recruited and tested in the same school as for Study 1.Thirty-two undergraduates (6% men, M � 20 years, SD � 4 years)were recruited and tested at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, andnone of them had participated in Study 1.

Procedure. Participants were told they were about to watch ashort film featuring a child (Anna/John) answering a question.Participants were forewarned that the video had no sound, andtherefore they would not know exactly what the target had beensaying. Moreover, participants learned that the child was known atschool for crying all the time [cry-baby condition] or for laughingall the time [cheerful condition].

The video consisted of the same 30-s close up of a target-childof the participant’s gender speaking with a sad facial expression.After watching the video, participants provided answers, whichwere recorded by the experimenter on the dependent measures (seenext section).

Measures.Situational ratings. Two items (adapted from Krull, 1993)

composed the situational ratings measure. Participants were asked“Do you think [John] was answering a question that was . . .” andprovided their ratings on a 5-point pictorial scale, identical to oneof the scales used in Study 1—anchored by the labels very sad–very happy, with pictorial labels ranging from a frowning face toan open-wide smiley face. The second item, using the same 5-pointpictorial scale, said “Do you think that another kid, answering thatsame question, would be . . . .”

These two ratings were correlated significantly (i.e., ps � .028)with each other at all grade levels (ranging from r � .40 forkindergarteners to r � .66 for second graders). The overall corre-lation between the two items was r � .52, p � .001.

Understanding dispositional information. One last questionaimed at verifying whether participants at all grade levels under-stood and remembered the dispositional information given at thebeginning of the procedure about the target. Participants wereasked “What is [John] usually like, in [his] day-to-day life?” The5-point pictorial scale was anchored by the phrases very sad(frowning face) and very happy (wide-open smiley face).

Results

Unlike Study 1, preliminary analyses in this study, via a 4 (gradelevel) � 2 (condition) � 2 (gender) ANOVA, revealed a signifi-cant interaction of the grade-level and gender factors, F(3, 104) �5.56, MSE � 0.59, p � .001, �p

2 � .138, with kindergarten andsecond-grade boys rating the situation as happier than girls. Un-dergraduates could not be included in this analysis, because therewas only one male participant per condition in that group. How-ever, gender did not interact significantly with condition, F(1,104) � 1, and we had no theoretical reasons to expect differentlevels of dispositional correction according to gender. Thus, weopted for dropping the gender variable and including the oldestgroup (i.e., undergraduates) in our focal ANOVA. We conducteda 5 (grade level) � 2 (condition) ANOVA on the situationalratings and the planned contrasts analysis.

Situational ratings. The ANOVA revealed a main effect ofgrade level on the situational ratings (i.e., regarding the questionthe actor was answering), F(4, 142) � 8.76, MSE � 0.64, p �.001, �p

2 � .198. Again, we did not hypothesize any main effects,

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but the inspection of the means suggested that younger participants(i.e., kindergarteners and second graders) rated the situation ashappier than older participants. A similar result (i.e., an increase inthe perception of dispositional sadness with age) was detected inStudy 1. However, unlike Study 1, there was not a main effect ofconditions in participants’ ratings of the situation, F(1, 142) � 1.More importantly, the two factors interacted significantly, F(4,142) � 7.18, p � .001, �p

2 � .168 (see Figure 2). As in Study 1,we decomposed the overall interaction in four more focused in-teraction contrasts, opposing younger groups to older groups infour different combinations. In this study, all one degree of free-dom contrasts were statistically significant. The effect size of thecontrast comparing kindergarteners’ to older groups’ ratings wascomparable to the effect obtained in Study 1, t(142) � 2.87, p �.005, Cohen’s d � 0.48. However, the contrasts comparing the twoor three younger groups with the three or two older groups hadstronger effect sizes than this first contrast, t(142) � 5.12, p �.001, Cohen’s d � 0.86, and t(142) � 4.45, p � .001, Cohen’s d �0.75, respectively. The contrast comparing all younger groups withundergraduates, contrary to Study 1, was statistically significant,t(142) � 2.18, p � .031, Cohen’s d � 0.37. These results corrob-orate the prediction derived from the three-stage model that theyounger participants’ situational characterizations differ statisti-cally from older participants’ characterizations.

We further tested our hypothesis that younger participants didnot correct their characterizations of the situation with the avail-able dispositional information about the actor using planned con-trasts that opposed the two conditions for each grade level. Theplanned contrast testing whether undergraduates inferred that thesad-looking child, described as usually cheerful, was answering asadder question than the same child when described as a cry-baby(the disposition of the actor in this latter case could account for thebehavior) was statistically significant, t(142) � 1.77, MSE � 0.64,p � .039, one-tailed, �p

2 � .022. This result replicates the resultsobtained with the original paradigm (Krull, 1993).

As expected, kindergarteners did not rate the situation as lesssad when the actor’s disposition could account for the sad expres-sion (i.e., cry-baby condition), t(142) � 1, one-tailed, �p

2 � .050,which is consistent with the assumption that kindergartners did not

correct their situational inferences with the available dispositionalinformation. In this study, second graders and sixth graders did notshow evidence of a dispositional correction either: second grade,t(142) � 1, �p

2 � .067; sixth grade, t(142) � 1, �p2 � .002; all

one-tailed. Only the older participants perceived the situation asbeing sadder when the dispositional information could not havecontributed to the sad expression, namely when the target wasbelieved to be usually a cheerful child: ninth grade, t(142) � 2.75,p � .003, one-tailed, �p

2 � .050.Interestingly, in this study both kindergarteners and second

graders seem to have done the reverse of the corrective reasoning,perceiving the situation as sadder when the actor had been de-scribed as a sad child. Since our hypothesis was directional, andwe accordingly performed one-tailed tests, the statistical signifi-cance of the difference between conditions was not tested, but theeffect sizes of the contrasts support the possibility that the happyor sad information about the actor might have primed a happier orsadder characterization of the situation.

We also tested if the groups who seemingly performed dispo-sitional correction provided ratings of the situation close to themidpoint of the scale in the condition where the behavior of theactor (i.e., the child’s expression) could be explained by the actor’sdispositions. In contrast to Study 1, neither ninth graders norundergraduates seem to have fully discounted their situationalcharacterizations, since their ratings differed significantly from themidpoint of the scale in the cry-baby condition: ninth grade,t(142) � 3.08, p � .003, �p

2 � .062; undergraduates, t(142) �3.92, p � .001, �p

2 � .098.Understanding dispositional information. We assessed

whether participants’ characterizations of the actor at the end ofthe study were consistent with the dispositional information pro-vided at the beginning of the study, before participants watched thevideo. This was especially important to confirm in kindergartners,since the developmental literature suggests that kindergartenershave a hard time processing dispositional information about anactor, which might have meant that they did not use this informa-tion because they did not encode it. At all grade levels, participantsstated that the actor previously described as being cheerful washappier than the actor previously described as being a cry-baby(none of the 95% CIs for the mean values overlapped betweenconditions). Most critically, kindergartners clearly considered thetargets to be dispositionally different (cry-baby: M � 2.47, 95% CI[1.56, 3.38]; cheerful: M � 4.13, 95% CI [3.58, 4.68]).

Discussion

The results of Study 2 are consistent with the prediction, derivedfrom the three-stage model, that only older participants use dispo-sitional information to adjust their characterizations of the situa-tion. In this study only teenagers and young adults characterizedthe situation (i.e., the question that the target child was answering)as sadder when the actor’s disposition could not account for thesad facial expression (i.e., in the cheerful vs. cry-baby condition).Younger children (i.e., 5- to 11-year-olds) apparently did not usethe additional information to correct their inferences about thesituation. Moreover, as in Study 1, it is very unlikely those youngerchildren failed at using the dispositional information because theydid not encode or understand it. All three of the youngest age

Figure 2. Mean values for the perceived sadness induced by the situationacross grade levels in the two experimental conditions of Study 2. Errorbars represent the standard error of the mean.

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groups were consistent in reporting that the actor was disposition-ally sadder in the cry-baby condition than in the cheerful condition.

Although the main results of Study 2 replicate the main resultsof Study 1, the age at which children showed evidence of correc-tion was not identical across studies. We used the same procedureand materials in both studies—the only difference was a piece ofverbal information, given before participants were exposed to thebehavioral information (i.e., some information about the situationin Study 1 and some information about the actor in Study 2). Onemight expect that children in a given age group would show, or notshow, evidence of the operation of correction in both studies.However, 7- to 11-year-olds, who corrected their characterizationsof the actor using the situational information in Study 1, did notcorrect their characterizations of the situation using the disposi-tional information in Study 2. This result seems to suggest that itmight have been easier for children (especially 7- to 11-year-olds)to characterize the person than to characterize the situation, leavingmore cognitive resources available for the correction process in theformer than in the latter event. Alternatively, children may besensitized to the relevance of discounting circumstances whenjudging someone before they are sensitized to the relevance ofdiscounting personal aspects when judging a situation. Such aconclusion is consonant with evidence in the developmental liter-ature that children, beginning around 7 or 8 years of age, are betterdescribed as dispositionalists (e.g., Rholes et al., 1990).

On the other hand, Study 2 results are inconsistent with thedominant view in the developmental literature of kindergartenersas situationists (e.g., Rholes et al., 1990). For one, there was noevidence that it was easier for 5-year-olds to make situational, overdispositional, inferences, since there were no signs of correction ineither study. Also, if 5-year-olds were strictly situationists, believ-ing that if people are sad, it is just because something sad happenedto them, then they should have rated the situation as (equally) sadin both conditions. However, this was not the case. Importantly,5-year-olds in this study did use the dispositional information theywere given about the actor—they correctly used it when directlyasked about how sad they imagined the actor to be in daily life, andthey seem to have used it when characterizing the situation, too,only in the opposite direction of correction (i.e., the situation wasperceived as sadder when the actor was described as sadder).Results such as these and others (e.g., 5-year-olds’ ability to drawtrait inferences from behavioral information and to draw behav-ioral inferences from trait information; Liu et al., 2007), suggestthat even young children are likely attuned to dispositional infor-mation, but might extract, process, or use it differently accordingto the specific task at hand (e.g., whether it is a labeling task orbehavioral prediction task).

The fact that in both studies younger children provided “hap-pier” ratings than older participants highlights one peril of usingstrongly valenced materials with children. Younger children didnot seem very comfortable with rating either people or situationsas sad. Therefore we designed a third study with the aim ofprecluding valenced material, but also other factors that could haveinfluenced younger children’s inferences in Studies 1 and 2, suchas prior expectancies about the actor (i.e., children might haveexpected that most other children are usually happy) or egocentricprojections (i.e., children might have thought that others are usu-ally happy because they themselves are). We considered it partic-ularly important to avoid the possibility that younger children

could rely on a prior expectancy, because the results of Study 1could have been explained simply by the younger children’s use ofprior expectancies in lieu of any specific information about theactor or the situation.

Study 3a—Weekend With a Friend

Very often what a person says is a good indicator of what thatperson thinks—but not always. Sometimes, for many different pos-sible reasons, people are constrained in what they say by the context.Adults make use both of what a person says and the constraintspresent in the situation (though over-relying on the expressed opinion)to guess the true attitude of that person. For example, a facultymember who touts the virtues of his department chair in the presenceof the chair may not be as convincing as a faculty member who toutshis department chair when the chair is absent. What about chil-dren—do they understand that context can impact the interpretationof what someone says?

In Study 3a, we adapted the attitude attribution paradigm (Jones& Harris, 1967), also used by Gilbert et al. (1988, Study 2), to testthe three-stage model. First, participants watched an animatedstory about a target-child who would spend the weekend with oneof two friends. In one of the conditions the target could choosewhich friend would be the host, but in the other condition the targetcould not choose [situational information]. Irrespective of exper-imental condition, the target always expressed joy over spendingthe weekend with the host friend [behavioral information]. Afterwatching the story, participants rated the true attitude of the targettoward the host friend [dispositional ratings] and offered expla-nations for the target’s behavior [understanding situational con-straints].

Method

Participants. Participants in this study included 30 kindergar-teners (47% girls, M � 5 years and 9 months, SD � 3 months), 30second graders (47% girls, M � 7 years and 10 months, SD � 4months), 31 sixth graders (58% girls, M � 11 years and 10 months,SD � 5 months), 30 ninth graders (47% girls, M � 14 years and9 months, SD � 4 months), and 30 undergraduates (93% women,M � 20 years, SD � 4 years). Although children and adolescentswere recruited in the same school as for Studies 1 and 2, none ofthem had participated in the previous studies. Adults were under-graduate students at ISCTE–University Institute of Lisbon, Portu-gal, and they received credits for a psychology course in exchangefor participation.

Procedure. Participants learned that they were about to see ashort story on a laptop featuring three child-characters. So that thedemands on memorization could be minimized, three cards withthe picture and the name of each character were introduced orally,placed in front of the participant, and left in sight during the restof the procedure for all grade levels.

The story consisted of a simple narrated animation (text avail-able in Appendix A), and targets were matched to participantgender. In the story, a target-child had two friends (there was noprior expectancy about which one of the friends was preferred bythe target). Because his or her parents were traveling the nextweekend, the target was to spend the weekend with one of thefriends. In one of the experimental conditions, both friends were

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available that weekend and so the target could freely choose withwhom to stay [choice condition]. Conversely, in the other condi-tion, a situational constraint was introduced by the fact that one ofthe friends was also traveling that weekend, rendering only one ofthe friends available [no-choice condition]. In both conditions, thestory ended with the target telling the host friend’s mom howhappy she or he was to spend the weekend with them.

After watching the story participants were prompted to retell itin order to check for comprehension and recall of the situationalconstraints in the no-choice condition. If participants did not(correctly) identify the host friend or did not mention the situa-tional constraints in the no-choice condition, the experimenterwould ask directly and would correct any mistakes. Kindergartnersand second graders always watched the story a second time afterthis step of the procedure. Older participants only watched thestory a second time if they hesitated or made a mistake whileretelling it. Participants, then, answered the dependent measures,which were recorded verbatim by the experimenter.

Measures.Dispositional ratings. This measure was a 7-point pictorial

scale (delivered in a two-step fashion described below), aimed atassessing the attitude that participants attributed to the targettoward the host friend (analogous to the perceived attitude mea-sure in Gilbert et al., 1988). First, participants answered the ques-tion “Do you think that [the target], truly truly, wanted more tostay with [the host friend], or with [the other friend], or with bothequally?” The upper part of the scale displayed the picture of eachfriend, for visual support, and a square in the middle. If partici-pants gave the undifferentiated answer, the square would bemarked, and the next dependent measure would follow. If partic-ipants chose one of the friends, the second part of the scale wouldbe introduced with the question “And do you think s/he wanted tostay with [the previously chosen friend] just a little bit more, somemore, or a lot more?” The lower part of the scale contained circlesof increasing size toward each end (i.e., indicating a larger pref-erence for one of the friends) for visual support. When participantschose the host friend, the rating would be coded with a positivesign, the smaller circle corresponding to value �1, the medium-sized circle to �2, and the larger circle to �3. The same codingwas applied when the other friend was chosen, except that anegative sign would be attributed. The undifferentiated answer wascoded with the value 0.

Understanding situational constraints. Participants then pro-vided explanations for the target’s behavior, by answering thefollowing question “Why do you think [the target] told [the hostfriend’s] mom that she would enjoy spending the weekend overthere, instead of telling that to [the other friend’s] mom?” Thismeasure was included to verify whether participants would invokethe situational constraints in the no-choice condition.

Results

Preliminary analyses did not find any significant effect for thegender variable, which was excluded from the reported analysis.Again, a 5 (grade level) � 2 (condition) ANOVA was conductedon the dispositional ratings, and the relevant planned contrastswere computed.

Dispositional ratings. The ANOVA revealed a main effectof grade level on the inference of the target’s preference for one

of the friends, F(4, 141) � 6.59, MSE � 1.69, p � .001, �p2 �

.157. As in the previous studies, our hypothesis did not concernany of the possible main effects, but the inspection of the meanssuggested a decrease in the extremity of the mean dispositionalratings with grade level. There was also a main effect ofcondition, F(1, 141) � 34.22, p � .001, �p

2 � .195, withperceived preference for the host friend in the choice conditionbeing much higher than in the no-choice condition. In thisstudy, the interaction between the two factors (i.e., grade leveland condition), which is depicted in the left hand side pane ofFigure 3, did not attain statistical significance, F(4, 141) � 1,�p

2 � .026. The more focused interaction contrasts did not attainstatistical significance either, although the contrast comparingkindergarteners’ to older participants’ ratings was marginallysignificant, t(141) � 1.66, p � .099, Cohen’s d � 0.28.

However, the contrast analysis, looking at differences accordingto condition per grade level, revealed the hypothesized pattern.The planned contrast for the undergraduates’ group confirmed thatadult participants attributed a more extreme attitude (i.e., prefer-ence for the host friend) to the target in the choice condition, thanin the no-choice condition, t(141) � 3.79, MSE � 1.69, p � .001,one-tailed, �p

2 � .092. As in the previous studies, this resultreplicates earlier findings with adults using the attitude attributionparadigm (e.g., Gilbert et al., 1988, Study 2; Jones & Harris,1967), thus validating the adequacy of our adaptation of theparadigm.

As predicted, kindergarteners’ ratings did not differ according towhether the target-child had, or did not have, the opportunity tochoose between the two friends, t(141) � 1.12, p � .132, one-tailed, �p

2 � .009. At all other grade levels, and again as predicted,the dispositional ratings differed according to condition: secondgraders, t(141) � 2.53, p � .006, �p

2 � .043; sixth graders,t(141) � 2.69, p � .004, �p

2 � .049; ninth graders, t(141) � 2.95,p � .002, �p

2 � .058; all one-tailed, MSE � 1.69.Planned contrasts analysis for the no-choice condition against

the midpoint of the scale revealed that, whereas kindergartenersdemonstrated the correspondence bias by inferring a preference forthe host friend even in the condition where the target could notchoose, t(141) � 4.96, MSE � 1.69, p � .001, �p

2 � .149, olderparticipants did not infer a preference of the target in that condition

Figure 3. Mean values for the perceived preference of the target for oneof the two friends across grade levels in the two experimental conditions ofStudies 3a and 3b. K � kindergarten. Error bars represent the standarderror of the mean.

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in any direction—second grade, t(141) � 1.59, p � .114, �p2 �

.018; sixth grade, ninth grade, and undergrads, ts � 1—indicatingthe use of situational information to correct correspondent infer-ences about the target’s disposition.

Understanding situational constraints. Although the proce-dure was designed to maximize participants’ recall of the situa-tional constraint in the no-choice condition (i.e., the fact that oneof the friends was not available), by making sure that participantsreferenced it after watching the story once, it was important tocheck whether kindergartners, who did not use that information intheir dispositional ratings of the target, would name the situationalconstraint as an explanation for the target’s behavior. The expla-nations provided for the target’s behavior were coded by twoindependent judges as referring to situational factors (i.e., transientaspects present in that particular situation), to a preference of thetarget (i.e., dispositional aspects), or as non-responses (i.e., “Idon’t know” or non-sensical answers).

The Cohen’s kappa coefficient of inter-judge agreement wascalculated for the explanations that were coded in a single category(97% of them), and the obtained value of � � .98 indicates anexcellent level of inter-judges agreement. Disagreements wereresolved through discussion between the two judges.

Participants explained the target’s behavior predominantly in-voking preference-related aspects in the choice condition (M �75%) and situational aspects in the no-choice condition (M �84%), at all grade levels. This result in kindergartners in theno-choice condition is particularly interesting because 67% of theparticipants explained the target’s behavior by explicitly mention-ing the unavailability of one of the friends (e.g., “because [thisone] was traveling”; the analogous percentages of participants forolder groups were as follows: 67% for second graders, 81% forsixth graders, 60% for ninth graders, and 93% for undergraduates).Likewise, although 67% of the kindergarteners inferred a prefer-ence for the available friend in the no-choice condition, 60% ofthose same children explained that the cause of the actor’s behav-ior was the unavailability of the other friend. Thus, the explana-tions provided by kindergarteners in the no-choice condition attestthat they were aware of the situational constraints, even thoughthey drew a correspondent dispositional inference in the previousmeasure.

Discussion

The results of this study support the prediction that only olderchildren use situational information to adjust their characteriza-tions of the actor. The younger children (i.e., 5-year-olds) inferredan attitude correspondent to the target’s behavior in both condi-tions, not taking the situational constraints into account. In thisstudy, 5-year-olds thought a child preferred to stay with his or herhost irrespective of whether the child chose that host or thesituation required it. In fact, in this study, the correspondentinference made by 5-year-olds in the no-choice condition is somarked that it is not statistically different from the correspondentinference in the choice condition. Importantly also, the correspon-dent inference in the no-choice condition did not originate in afaulty understanding or lack of recall of the constraints imposed bythe situation, since the majority of the 5-year-olds accuratelyreferenced those constraints while explaining the target’s behavior.In contrast, all other age groups attributed a correspondent attitude

to the target-child only in the choice condition, using the situa-tional information to adequately adjust the dispositional rating.

The central results of these first three studies, namely, theabsence of evidence of correction in young children’s social in-ferences coupled with the presence of evidence of correction inolder children’s social inferences as predicted by the three-stagemodel, are consistent across studies. However, some other resultswere not consistently obtained: (a) younger children’s ratings werestatistically different from older participants’ ratings in Studies 1and 2, but not in Study 3a; (b) younger children’s characterizationsof the actor or situation were correspondent to the categorization ofthe behavior in Study 3a and partially in Study 2, but not in Study1; and (c) 7- to 11-year-olds showed signs of correction in Studies1 and 3a, but not in Study 2. The latter inconsistent result mighthave originated in the different tasks we asked participants toperform, namely to provide dispositional characterizations in Stud-ies 1 and 3a, and situational characterizations in Study 2. Since wedid not have a priori hypotheses about the age of emergence ofcorrection across several kinds of social inference, this inconsis-tency does not represent a problem for the current investigationand exploring its causes, albeit important, stands clearly outsidethe scope of the present article. In contrast, the first two inconsis-tent results may have relevant consequences for the main focus ofthis article. First, it would be desirable to show that young chil-dren’s performance is systematically different form older chil-dren’s and adults’ performance. Thus, we decided to run a quickdirect replication of Study 3a, since the interaction contrast be-tween 5-year-olds and older age groups did not attain statisticalsignificance in this study. Second, if young children’s character-izations in Study 1 (and partially in Study 2) were not correspon-dent to their categorizations of the behavior, nor random, theywere likely derived from other factors. Following evidence thatprior expectancies play a role in how adults draw dispositionalinferences (Jones & Harris, 1967; Jones, Worchel, Goethals, &Grumet, 1971), we hypothesized that one of these factors might bechildren’s prior expectancies about the actor, namely that thetarget-child in Study 1 was usually happy, because children, ingeneral, are usually happy. To test this hypothesis we included inthe direct replication study—Study 3b—one last question aboutparticipants’ expectancies of how happy children usually are.

Study 3b—Weekend With a Friend (Replication)

Study 3b is a direct replication of Study 3a, with fewer agegroups, and an additional question at the end. This question aimedat assessing participants’ expectations about how happy or sadchildren usually are. If we do not find any age related changes,then differential prior expectancies about the actor in Study 1cannot plausibly explain why kindergarteners rated the actor ashappy, although her or his behavior was sad. On the other hand, ifkindergarteners, compared to older children and adults, expectchildren to be happier, then prior expectancies may have played arole in Study 1 results.

Method

Participants. Data for this replication study were collected byundergraduate students of ISCTE–University Institute of Lisbon,Portugal, as part of a research assignment (experimenters were

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blind to the hypothesis at data collection time). The experimentersrecruited 81% of the kindergarteners and 43% of the sixth gradersat schools. The remaining participants were acquaintances of theexperimenters. Participants in this study were 36 kindergarteners(47% boys, M � 5 years and 9 months, SD � 5 months), 28 sixthgraders (39% boys, M � 11 years and 7 months, SD � 5 months),and 22 adults (45% men, M � 29 years, SD � 15 years). Incomparison to the sample of Study 3a, this sample was moreheterogeneous regarding socio-economic background (65% of thekindergarteners came from a school that serves mainly disadvan-taged population), and the adult sample was much more heteroge-neous in terms of age and occupation.

Procedure and measures. The procedure and measures forthis study were identical to the procedure and measures of Study3a, with the exception of one question that was added at the end ofthe study and presented as an unrelated question.

Replication measures. As a brief reminder, participants saw astory where a target-child expressed joy about staying with a friendover the weekend. In one of the conditions, the target had chosenbetween two available friends, whereas in the other condition, thetarget did not get to choose because one of the friends was notavailable. The participants’ task was to attribute an underlyingattitude (guess the true preference) of the target. The measureswere a 7-point pictorial scale for the dispositional ratings (i.e., theattribution of an attitude) and an open question for the understand-ing of the situational constraints (i.e., the explanation of the tar-get’s behavior).

Prior expectancies. After participants completed this proce-dure, they were asked to answer one more question that wasunrelated to the previous ones. Participants were then asked tothink about children in general and to rate what children areusually like on a 5-point pictorial scale, anchored at very sad andvery happy (identical to the ones used in Studies 1 and 2).

Results

Dispositional ratings. The replication results of this study aredepicted in the right hand side pane of Figure 3. A 3 (group) � 2(condition) ANOVA revealed only a main effect of condition onthe inference of the target’s preference for one of the friends, F(1,80) � 5.74, MSE � 3.46, p � .019, �p

2 � .067. The plannedcontrasts analysis, testing whether only the older participants, andnot the younger ones, used the situational information to correcttheir dispositional characterizations, replicated the pattern again.Kindergartener’s ratings did not differ according to condition,t(80) � 1, �p

2 � .003, whereas sixth graders’ and adults’ ratingsdiffered in the expected direction, t(80) � 1.72, p � .045, �p

2 �.035, and t(80) � 1.80, p � .038, �p

2 � .039, respectively, allone-tailed. Moreover, kindergarteners showed the correspondencebias again, by attributing an attitude to the target that was corre-spondent to the behavior in the no-choice condition, t(80) � 3.17,p � .002, �p

2 � .111. This was not the case for the two oldergroups, whose ratings did not differ from the midpoint of the scalein the no-choice condition, both ts � 1.

However, neither the overall interaction between group andcondition, F(2, 80) � 1, nor the two more focused interactioncontrasts, were statistically significant. The effect size of theinteraction contrast opposing kindergarteners’ to the two oldergroups’ ratings was identical to the equivalent contrast in Study 3a,

t(80) � 1.23, p � .221, Cohen’s d � 0.28. Since Studies 3a and 3bshare the exact same methods (expect for the last question of Study3b), and the results go in the same direction, we combined bothdata sets for the common age groups, in order to increase testpower. We then calculated a new 3 (group) � 2 (condition) � 2(study) ANOVA. The study factor did not produce any significanteffects or interactions, all Fs � 1. This time the interaction contrastcomparing the youngest group to the older groups attained statis-tical significance, t(171) � 2.01, p � .043, Cohen’s d � 0.31.Moreover, adopting an estimation approach, instead of relyingsolely on statistical significance testing, we calculated the 95% CIsfor the effect sizes (given by Cohen’s d) of this contrast acrossStudies 1, 2, 3a, and 3b (using ESCI software; Cumming, 2011).As Figure 4 shows, the confidence intervals for the four studiesoverlap substantially and none of them includes 0. Taking the esti-mation approach, the results of the four studies are thus consistent,and together provide quite strong evidence that these studies captureda real, albeit small, effect, replicated across four studies.

Understanding situational constraints. The behavioral ex-planations provided by the participants in this study replicated thefindings of Study 3a, too. In the choice condition, the majority ofthe explanations (87%) referred preference-related aspects in con-trast to situational factors. The reverse was true for the no-choicecondition, where 75% of the explanations contained the situationalconstraint present in the story, namely, that one of the friends wasnot available. In this study, 62% of the kindergarteners (vs. 73% ofthe sixth graders and 91% of the adults) explicitly stated thesituational constraints. Again, although 67% of the kindergartenersinferred a preference for the available friend in the no-choicecondition, 54% of those children attributed the cause of the actor’sbehavior to the unavailability of the other friend. In sum, in bothstudies, more than half of the kindergarteners who did not use thesituational information to correct the dispositional characterizationwere explicitly aware of this information.

Prior expectancies. The last question of this study aimed atassessing participants’ prior expectancies of how sad or happychildren usually are. This question was unrelated to the replicationstudy itself, and we did not find differences in participants’ an-swers according to previous experimental condition. A 3

Figure 4. Forest plot showing the effect sizes (given by Cohen’s d), their95% confidence intervals, and the summary measure for the contrastcomparing kindergartners’ to older groups’ ratings across four studies.

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(group) � 2 (gender) ANOVA revealed only a main effect ofgroup, F(2, 80) � 10.77, MSE � 0.46, p � .001, �p

2 � .212. Acontrast opposing kindergarteners to sixth graders and adults washighly significant, t(80) � 4.16, p � .001, �p

2 � .178. All groupsshared the expectancy that usually children are happy (i.e., the95% CIs around the mean did not include the midpoint of thescale). However, kindergarteners rated children to be usually hap-pier (M � 4.75, 95% CI [4.50, 5.00]) than sixth graders (M � 3.96,95% CI [3.68, 4.25]) and adults did (M � 4.32, 95% CI [4.11,4.53]).

Discussion

Overall, Study 3b directly replicated the findings of Study 3aand conceptually the findings of Studies 1 and 2. All studies showdifferential correction in younger versus older children, althoughthe magnitude of this effect was lower in Studies 3a and 3b. Onepossible explanation for this might be that in these two last studiescorrection most likely involved only discounting and was re-stricted to one experimental condition (i.e., the reasoning that onecannot infer a preference if the actor did not freely choose). In thetwo first studies, correction most likely involved both discounting(i.e., the reasoning that one cannot know how sad the child usuallyis if she’s telling a sad story) and augmenting (i.e., the reasoningthat the child must be unusually sad if she’s sad while telling ahappy story), applying thus to both experimental conditions. De-spite these differences, the meta-analytical combination of theresults of the four studies strongly supports the developmentalprediction derived from the three-stage model.

There is, however, a pressing question regarding the resultsof the three previous studies that should be addressed at thispoint. In the social psychological literature both the attitudeattribution and the silent interview paradigms have been used tostudy the correspondence bias with adults, but the presentadaptations have failed to produce this bias with undergradu-ates, and even ninth graders. Rather than a flaw, though, webelieve that a paradigm in which adults could perform fullcorrection was the most methodologically sound option for ourpurposes for mainly two reasons. (1) The information providedto the participants had to be simple enough to be understoodeven by 5-year-olds. In adult studies the material is usually lessclear-cut, which makes it harder for the participants to recog-nize when full correction is attained. (2) More importantly, hadthe chosen task not promoted full correction among adults, thenit would probably not have allowed for a visible differentiationbetween adults’ and children’s performances, which wasneeded to test our predictions.

The results of Study 3b also corroborate the possibility thatyounger children had differential expectancies about how happythe target in Study 1 was, suggesting that kindergarteners mighthave used prior expectancies to draw dispositional inferencesabout the actor, overriding the observed behavior. Based on thisfinding, we slightly changed gears for our last study. With Studies1–3, we illustrated how developmental data may be used to test“adult” models. The aim of Study 4 is to illustrate yet another waydevelopmental data may be useful for social cognitive theorizing,namely by suggesting ways to fine-tune those models. For thatpurpose, we focused on the role played by prior expectancies in theway young children characterize an actor. Prior expectancies are

not an explicit part of the three-stage model. The model assumesthat characterization is largely dependent on behavior categoriza-tion. This stance makes sense, since the three-stage model wasbuilt to explain the correspondence bias, and adults show this biaseven when they have a prior expectancy about the actor. None-theless, prior expectancies do impact adults’ characterizations ofthe actor (e.g., Jones & Harris, 1967; Jones et al., 1971). If thedegree to which prior expectancies are used to derive character-izations are variable across, say, populations (e.g., 5-year-olds vs.adults) or situations (e.g., first impressions vs. actor is familiar tothe observer), then it would be desirable to include the construct ofprior expectancies in the model.

In Study 4, we tested whether younger children would prefer-entially base their characterizations on observed behavior or onprior expectancies, when the actor’s actions were constrained bythe situation. Study 4 shares the same paradigm as Studies 3, butwith a few modifications. If younger children, in this variation ofthe paradigm, base their characterizations of the actor on theprovided prior expectancy and not in the observed behavior, thiswould provide evidence for one interesting boundary conditionregarding the correspondence bias in young children.

Study 4—Weekend With One’s Close Friend

When a person cannot act freely in a given situation, it is hardto guess this person’s attitudes or preferences—except if we knowsomething about this person’s past actions. Then, we may form anexpectancy from which we can tentatively derive the person’s trueattitude. For example, we would rely on Steve’s previous behavior,rather than his current behavior, to predict how he will act at aparty tonight, if at present he is meeting his girlfriend’s parents forthe first time. Presumably his behavior is quite constrained at thisparticular moment and therefore not as predictive of how he willact in the future. Is that what children do, too? In Study 4 we askedhow young children would characterize the attitude of an actor, ifthey had a prior expectancy about the actor’s attitude that some-times would clash with the actor’s present behavior. Participantswatched the same animated story about a target-child who had tospend the weekend with one of two friends used in Study 3.However, this time, one of the friends was described at the begin-ning of the story as being closer to the target-child [prior expec-tancy] and in both conditions one of the friends was not available(was traveling, too), thus putting the target in a no-choice condi-tion [situational information]. Therefore, half of the participantswatched a story where the “close friend” got to be the host of thetarget for the weekend, while the other half of the participantswatched a story where the “not-so-close friend” got to be the host.Again, independent of who the host was, the target always ex-pressed joy over spending the weekend with the host friend [be-havioral information]. After watching the story, participants ratedthe true attitude of the target toward the host friend [dispositionalratings] and offered justifications for their ratings [prior expec-tancies role].

Method

Participants. Participants in this study included 31 kinder-garteners (55% girls, M � 5 years and 9 months, SD � 4months), 30 second graders (57% girls, M � 7 years and 8

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months, SD � 4 months), 30 sixth graders (53% girls, M � 11years and 3 months, SD � 7 months), and 30 ninth graders(60% girls, M � 14 years and 8 months, SD � 5 months).Again, a set of children and adolescents who had not yetparticipated in the previous studies was recruited at the sameschool as in the previous studies. A sample of undergraduateswas not included in this study because in the previous studies nosubstantial differences between ninth graders’ and undergrad-uates’ performances were found, and there were no theoreticalreasons to expect a difference between the two groups in thepresent study.

Procedure. The procedure for this study was similar to theprocedure of the previous study. The same animated story (anda card for each character placed in sight) was used with a slightmodification in the beginning— one of the two friends waspresented as a good friend of the target, who shared manycontexts with him or her (i.e., classroom, recess, swimmingclass), thus introducing the expectancy that the target had amore positive attitude toward this friend (text available inAppendix B). From that point on, the content of the story wasthe same as in the previous study in the no-choice condition,namely, the target could not choose with whom to stay duringthe weekend since only one of the friends was available. Forhalf of the participants the host friend would be the one intro-duced as the closest friend of the target [pro-expectancy con-dition], while for the other half of participants the host friendwould be the other friend [anti-expectancy condition]. The storyended with the same behavioral expression by the target,namely of joy over spending the weekend with the host friend.

When participants finished watching the animated story for thefirst time, instead of being asked to retell the story, this timeparticipants were asked three control questions aimed at checkingparticipants’ memory (1) for the expectancy, “Who was friends atschool?”; (2) for the situational constraint, “Who’s not going to behere for the weekend?”; and (3) for the direction of the behavior,“With whom will [the target] stay?” Any hesitations or mistakes atthis stage prompted the experimenter to restate the correct namewhile pointing to the correspondent character’s card. All kinder-garteners and second graders watched the story for a second time,in order to enhance participants’ understanding and memory for itscontents. Older participants saw the story a second time only whenthey failed one of the questions (i.e., 7% of the sixth graders and3% of the ninth graders).

Measures.Dispositional ratings. The attitude attribution measure for the

present study was identical to the one in Study 3 (“Do you thinkthat [the target], truly truly, wanted more to stay with [the hostfriend], or with [the other friend], or with both equally?”). The datawere coded so that positive values indicate preference for the hostfriend, independently of whether the host friend was the closefriend or the other friend.

Role of prior expectancies. After responding to the first de-pendent measure, participants were invited to justify their answerwith the question, “Why do you think [the target] would prefer tostay with [participant’s choice in the previous measure]?” Thismeasure was included mainly to verify whether participants wouldinvoke the prior expectancy that the target would prefer the closefriend.

Results

As in the previous study, no significant effects for the gendervariable were identified, and thus the results of a 4 (grade level) �2 (condition) ANOVA are reported here.

Dispositional ratings. The only significant effect revealed bythe ANOVA was the predicted main effect of condition, F(1,113) � 113.28, MSE � 2.52, p � .001, �p

2 � .501 (see Figure 5),indicating that participants inferred that the target’s attitude wouldbe in line with the prior expectancy (i.e., the target preferred theclose friend), independently of the target’s behavior (i.e., thepositive statement directed at the other friend). This was true forevery grade level, as attested by the planned contrasts analysisagainst the midpoint of the scale (all ps � .001). This finding isparticularly interesting for the kindergarteners’ group. Althoughkindergarteners showed the correspondence bias both in Study 3aand Study 3b (i.e., they inferred that the target preferred the hostfriend although they knew she or he did not chose that particularfriend), they avoided this bias when a prior expectancy, aboutwhich of the friends was the preferred one, was available, t(113) �3.78, MSE � 2.52, p � .001, �p

2 � .112. The interaction contrastopposing the youngest group’s ratings to all other groups’ ratingswas not significant, t(113) � 1, �p

2 � .001, as none of the otherinteraction contrasts, all ts � 1, which supports the suppositionthat in this study kindergarteners’ ratings were not different fromthe older groups’ ratings.

Role of prior expectancies. To check whether participants infact mentioned the role played by the prior expectancy, two judgescoded the justifications offered by the participants in four catego-ries. The situational category included references to the constraintspresent in the situation, namely the unavailability of one of thefriends (e.g., “because this one couldn’t and so she had to go to thisone’s house”). The behavior category included references to thetarget’s statement of joy over spending the weekend with the hostfriend (e.g., “because he said in the story that he would like verymuch to stay”). The expectancy category included all references tothe induced expectancy that the target was closer to one of thefriends than to the other (e.g., “because they are best friends atschool”). Finally, the egalitarian category included all the answersthat failed to indicate friendship differences between the threecharacters (e.g., “because they were all friends”).

Figure 5. Mean values for the perceived preference of the target for oneof the two friends across grade levels in the two experimental conditions ofStudy 4. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean.

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The justifications that were coded in a single category (81% ofall justifications) yielded a Cohen’s kappa coefficient of � � .85.The final coding of the previous disagreements was settled bydiscussion between the two coders.

The substantial majority (M � 78%) of the justifications pro-vided for the dispositional ratings included a reference to the priorexpectancy, for all grade levels and both conditions, suggestingthat the prior expectancy played an important role in the drawingof the dispositional inference about the target for young and olderchildren alike. No discernible effect of either grade level or con-dition was found for the different kinds of justifications.

Discussion

In this study participants at all grade levels inferred that a childpreferred to spend the weekend with her or his close friend, indepen-dent of which friend she or he got to spend it with. The priorexpectancy was induced by describing one of the friends as a friendat school and swimming lessons, who spent more time with the target,and the other one as a friend only at the swimming lessons. Since noinformation was given about how much the target liked one or theother friend, we believe that the preference for the close friend reflectsa dispositional inference children made. From a logical point of view,these results are hardly surprising. However, in the framework of thethree-stage model these results mean that children as young as 5-year-olds did not characterize the actor of a behavior based on the catego-rization of the behavior, but rather based on a prior expectancy aboutthat actor. In other words, even the youngest children in our studywere able to avoid the correspondence bias when information aboutthe actor’s past behaviors was available.

The goal of this study, in contrast to the three previous studies, wasnot to test the three-stage model of social inference, but rather toillustrate how developmental data could inform the model. The pres-ent results challenge the assumption that the characterization of theactor follows directly from the categorization of the behavior byshowing that prior expectancies about the actor may be a determinantas important and efficient as behavior, at least under certain circum-stances, for this characterization. This data set strongly suggests thatthe process of drawing dispositional inferences based on prior expec-tancies is a quite efficient process and not a corrective process aspresumably situational correction is, or 5-year-olds would have shownthe same difficulty with it as they have shown with situational ordispositional correction in Studies 1–3. Moreover, these results sug-gest that the model would be more complete if the role of priorexpectancies is considered. Additional studies could test exactlywhich role prior expectancies play, for instance, whether they inhibit,facilitate, or otherwise shape dispositional inferences based on behav-ior.

General Discussion

The present investigation provided developmental evidence in fa-vor of and further informed the three-stage model of social inference(Gilbert et al., 1988). We found evidence that only older children, andnot younger children, correct their characterizations of an actor orsituation taking additional situational or dispositional information intoaccount—consistent with this model’s assumptions that correction isa more resource demanding operation than characterization. In Study1, 5-year-olds did not use the situational information about whether a

child was talking about a gift or a punishment while assessing thechild’s usual mood; in contrast, older participants did use this infor-mation. In Study 2, 5- to 11-year-olds did not use the informationabout whether a child was known to be dispositionally sad or happywhile assessing how sadness-inducing a question was, but teenagersand young adults did use this information. In Study 3, 5-year-olds didnot take into account whether a child had, or had not, freely chosen afriend to spend the weekend with, in assessing the child’s preferencefor that friend. Again, older participants took this situational informa-tion into account. The results of the three studies, thus, corroborate thegeneral prediction of the model, suggesting that with age, the correc-tion step became more likely to be used.

The main finding in this article, namely increased use of additionalinformation to correct characterizations of people and situationsacross age, was obtained using two different paradigms (i.e., silentinterview and attitude attribution), two different epistemic goals (i.e.,to characterize the actor or the situation), two different types ofdispositional factors (i.e., traits and attitudes), different material (i.e.,non-verbal and verbal), and different types of constraints (i.e., anemotion-inducing situation or a no-choice situation). While thesemethodological differences may be regarded as valuable for the con-ceptual replication of the effect, it should be acknowledged that suchdifferences matter and may have a big influence in how participantsdeal with the specific task or given information, particularly in devel-opmental studies, where slight changes may impact differentially thedemands posed on younger versus older children’s cognitive systems.For example, in Studies 1 and 2, participants were asked to make ajudgment about a target (i.e., a dyadic context). In Studies 3 and 4,participants were asked to make a judgment about the target’s reactionto an attitudinal object (i.e., a triadic context). Methodological differ-ences such as these could have contributed to some of the findings thatwere not shared between studies (e.g., younger children’s character-izations of the actor or situation were not always correspondent tobehavior in Studies 1 and 2, in contrast to Studies 3a and 3b).However, it is reassuring that, in spite of these differences, the resultsof this set of studies converge to the same theoretical implication,namely with age children show more and more adherence to the fullthree-stage model of social inference.

Prior Expectancies

The data obtained here additionally suggest some conceptual fine-tuning of the model as it applies to development. In particular, ourresults suggest that the link between behavioral categorization andcharacterization is not as direct or exclusive as the model seems toimply—prior expectancies seem to be an efficient determinant ofcharacterization, too, used even by the youngest children in ourstudies.

An alternative explanation for the lack of correspondence betweenyounger children’s characterizations and the behaviors they observedis that the process of drawing dispositional inferences changes radi-cally throughout development, in which case the three-stage modelwould not be applicable to early childhood. As mentioned before, it isdebatable whether young children, such as kindergarteners, drawdispositional inferences at all (e.g., Rholes et al., 1990). Moreover,some of our data could be re-interpreted as showing that kindergar-teners did not draw dispositional inferences from behavior (Study 1)and that their characterizations of the actors may simply reflect priorexpectancies (Studies 3b and 4). In other words, it could be the case

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that younger children’s characterizations are based on prior expectan-cies, while older children’s and adults’ characterizations are based onbehavior. If this alternative explanation is true, then using the samemethod across ages may have been problematic. However, we do notthink that younger children entirely bypass the characterization pro-cess nor do they rely exclusively on prior expectancies. For instance,in Studies 3a and 3b, where a prior expectancy was not available,5-year-olds’ characterizations of the actor were very similar to olderchildren’s and adults’ characterizations. Moreover, adults take priorexpectancies into account when characterizing others, too (e.g., Jones& Harris, 1967). In sum, considering the extant data, both behavioralcategorization and prior expectancies seem to contribute to children’sand adults’ characterizations and, from this perspective, a formulationof the three-stage model encompassing both variables would increasethe model’s descriptive power.

This is not to say that the three-stage model of social inferencecompletely ignores the role played by prior expectancies. This modelwas designed to explain the correspondence bias, which occurs evenwhen perceivers have prior expectancies about the actor. Moreover,the model was built upon a literature and theoretical antecessors, suchas the correspondent inference theory (Jones & Davis, 1965; Jones &McGillis, 1976), where both prior expectancies and observed behav-ior were contemplated. However, that literature focused on howperceivers would weigh prior expectancies and behavior when theactor had behaved freely, because only under these circumstanceswould the behavior be diagnostic of a disposition. On the contrary, inour Study 4, we were interested in assessing the role played by priorexpectancies when the behavior is not diagnostic of the actor’s dis-positions (i.e., when the actor was constrained by the situation tobehave in a given way). In Study 3, 5-year-olds treated a non-diagnostic behavior as diagnostic of a disposition; in Study 4, wetested whether this would still happen if they had a diagnostic piece ofinformation available, namely a prior expectancy about the actor. Inother words, children as young as 5 years of age were able to avoid thecorrespondence bias, when a diagnostic expectancy about the actorwas provided to them. This consideration, in turn, leads us to con-template prior expectancies in a new light—one that departs some-what from the way prior expectancies are usually considered in theliterature.

Prior work has demonstrated that expectancies make perceivers seecorrelations between group-membership and traits where there arenone (e.g., Hamilton & Rose, 1980), expectancies make perceiversinterpret behaviors in stereotype-consistent ways (e.g., Sagar & Scho-field, 1980), and random expectancies of the perceivers can makeactors behave in a way that confirms those expectancies (e.g.,Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977).Findings such as these highlight the negative side of holding priorexpectancies. Our results, on the other hand, point in a different andimportant direction. Previous research has shown that perceivers bothtend to over-rely on behavior to characterize an actor and tend to havea hard time taking contextual factors into account while formingcharacterizations. Behavior, however, is contextually dependent,which means that if perceivers rely solely on behavioral categoriza-tion to infer the character of the actor, they will struggle to attain astable impression. Prior expectancies are possibly a highly useful toolto provide perceivers with the cognitive stability they need to navigatethe social world, somehow compensating for the difficulty of fullyconsidering the situational information—much like our expectancyabout a shape of an object compensates for our ever-changing per-

spectives in which we see the object. The early acquired ability tocharacterize an actor based on prior expectancies, evident in theresults of Study 4, speaks to this notion that prior expectanciespossibly play an important and stabilizing role in person perception. Inother words, the biases that prior expectancies introduce in personperception may sometimes have the positive consequence of compen-sating for this other bias—the correspondence bias.

Too Young to Correct—But Why?

While we favor an interpretation of these data that suggests that thecorrection process is acquired ontogenetically later than the categori-zation or characterization processes, an alternative interpretation ofthe same results is that the experimental tasks were themselves moredemanding for younger children than for older children, taxing theyounger children’s cognitive resources to a larger extent, and thuscorrupting the operation of an eventually already acquired correctionprocess. Importantly, for testing the three-stage model of social infer-ence, which was the primary goal of this investigation, both of thesepotential explanations are consistent with the model. That is, whetherthe presumed more complex operation is acquired later in ontogeny orif the presumed more demanding operation is more easily corrupted inparticipants with less available cognitive resources (i.e., youngerchildren), the model is supported by these data. Future studies mightaddress these two possibilities by investigating eventual moderators ortriggers of corrective processes in social inference, focusing particu-larly in young children.

A related question, which we believe is also worth pursuing, is thedevelopmental study of what exactly changes with age (and themechanisms that operate that change) in such explicit social inferencetasks as the ones employed in the present investigation. Are olderchildren more proficient at correcting dispositional inferences withsituational information merely because they have more availablecognitive resources to devote to the integration of different pieces ofinformation? Do they at some point extract a rule—such as thediscounting principle—which they then apply? Are they explicitlytaught through socialization that behavior is multiply determined? Oris the mechanism something different entirely?

Social Inference in Childhood Beyond theThree-Stage Model

Further investigating the development of the corrective operationacross childhood would probably be valuable not only to inform theparticular instance of how children perceive others they have nevermet, based on the observation of a single behavior, but more generallyof how children form impressions of others that share a substantialpart of their life (e.g., classmates). For instance, developmental re-search on children’s impressions of known others has shown that,with development, children’s free descriptions of others become in-creasingly more detailed and nuanced (e.g., Livesley & Bromley,1973) and children’s ratings of others become increasingly attuned tothe differences between the targets of their perception (Malloy, Sug-arman, Montvilo, & Ben-Zeev, 1995). Generally, findings such asthese have been interpreted as evidence that the development ofchildren’s social perceptions is fueled by their increasing abilities togo beyond concrete instances of behavior and their own idiosyncra-sies as perceivers and by their exposure to more experienced perceiv-ers who teach them sociocultural norms to interpret behavior (see,

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e.g., Malloy et al., 1995). These findings are consistent with our owndata. Maybe part of the reason why children become more accurateand attuned to the target’s differences is because they acquire theability, or extract or learn the norm, to apply corrective reasoning tothe inferences they make about others.

At first sight, another way our data could be regarded as relating toextant developmental research on children’s social perception is con-cerning the debate of whether younger children tend to spontaneouslymake situational characterizations, while older children tend to makedispositional characterizations. However, the results of the presentinvestigation do not speak directly to this debate. The main goal ofthis investigation was to test the three-stage model and to do so, wealways provided participants with a specific goal or, in other words,we asked for a deliberate and not spontaneous dispositional or situa-tional inference. However, our studies do not corroborate, and in factcontain some evidence that contradicts, the claim that young children(e.g., 5-year-olds) do not make dispositional inferences (Rholes et al.,1990). We believe that an interesting and fruitful future study wouldcarefully investigate questions related to dispositional inference acrosschildhood. For example, when faced with a trait-implicative behaviorwould younger children be quicker at recognizing a situational infer-ence than a dispositional inference (e.g., using an adaptation of E.Smith & Miller’s, 1983, paradigm) and would the reverse be true forolder children, as suggested currently in the developmental literature?Would there be identifiable individual differences beyond the generaldevelopmental trajectory, with entity and incremental theorists, forexample, drawing one kind of inference more consistently than theother kind? How do trait ratings, spontaneous trait inferences, explicitdispositional inferences, behavioral predictions, behavioral explana-tions, prior expectancies, among other related concepts, interplayacross development? The answers to all these questions, wemaintain, are not only interesting and useful to understand howchildren think about the social world, but to understand how thehuman mind thinks about the social world.

To conclude, the present developmental inquiry adds yet anotherpiece of validity to the three-stage model, by showing that cor-recting one’s own social inferences with additional information isnot only a more demanding process in adulthood, but also some-thing that is mastered only later in development. At the same time,this inquiry suggests that the three-stage model would likely gainin descriptive power, both for children and adults, if it explicitlymodelled the way prior expectancies are integrated in character-izations. In other words, this investigation corroborates what all ofus already knew—if it is hard for adults to walk a mile in anotherperson’s shoes, that walk is even harder for a 5-year-old.

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(Appendices follow)

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.5.961

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.3.192

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.3.192

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.11.005



http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1128250

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1128250

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1129774

http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0404_2

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1129966

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1130364

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.4.590

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.4.590

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417632

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.3.492

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.3.492

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.4.737

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.34.5.857

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.9.656

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.9.656

Appendix A

Text Accompanying Story for Studies 3a and 3b (Translated From Portuguese)

This is Anna, this is Catherine, and this is Jane. They are in the same swimming class. Next weekend Anna’sparents will be traveling, and they told her that she could stay with one of her friends. When the girls leavethe locker room they find their moms chatting outside. Then, Anna’s mom goes to her and tells her: “Anna!I have talked with Catherine’s and Jane’s moms.

[choice condition] Both of them say that you can spend the weekend at their houses. So now you just haveto choose, and tell one of them that you wish to stay over there.[no-choice condition] Jane will also be away this weekend. Therefore you’ll have to stay with Catherine. Sonow you just have to tell Catherine’s mom that you wish to stay over there.”Anna goes to Catherine’s mom and says: “I’m so glad I can spend the weekend with you! I’d like that a lot.Is it settled then?”

Appendix B

Text Accompanying Story for Study 4 (Translated From Portuguese)

This is Anna and this is Catherine. They are good friends at school. They are always together in theclassroom and at the playground. They also go to the same swimming class. And this here is Jane, another girlwho is together with Anna and Catherine in the swimming class. Next weekend Anna’s parents will betraveling, and they told her that she could stay with one of her friends. When the girls leave the locker roomthey find their moms chatting outside. Then, Anna’s mom goes to her and tells her: “Anna! I have talked withCatherine’s and Jane’s moms.

[pro-expectancy condition] Jane will also be away this weekend. Therefore you’ll have to stay withCatherine. So now you just have to tell Catherine’s mom that you wish to stay over there.[anti-expectancy condition] Catherine will also be away this weekend. Therefore you’ll have to stay with Jane.So now you just have to tell Jane’s mom that you wish to stay over there.”Anna goes to Catherine’s (or Jane’s) mom and says: “I’m so glad I can spend the weekend with you! I’d likethat a lot. Is it settled then?”

Received December 17, 2013Revision received April 29, 2014

Accepted May 4, 2014 �

Correction to Vorauer and Sasaki (2011)

In the article “In the Worst Rather Than the Best of Times: Effects of Salient Intergroup Ideologyin Threatening Intergroup Interactions” by Jacquie D. Vorauer and Stacey J. Sasaki (Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 2011, Vol. 101, No. 2, pp. 307–320. doi:10.1037/a0023152),there was an error in the reported interpretation of the results of the regression analyses in thisarticle. The contrast coding procedure for the regression analyses and the predicted values areaccurately reported. However, the contrast coding procedure that was used tested contrasts with thegrand mean across all of the ideology conditions rather than contrasts with the no-message controlcondition. Readers interested in the results of alternative contrasts may contact the first author fordetails.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000006

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Hagá, Garcia-Marques & Olson (2014)

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