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Poster #198 - Why did she do that? Chinese children attribute positive and negative behaviors to personality traits over situations

Thu, March 21, 12:30 to 1:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Personality attributions have an important influence on psychosocial development (Choi & Kim, 2003). For example, children who attribute peers’ negative behavior to internal causes and fail to account for situational causes may develop a hostile attribution bias that interferes with friendships (Crick & Dodge, 1994). Although previous research has illuminated influences on trait reasoning (Boseovski, Chiu, & Marcovitch, 2013; Heyman & Gelman, 1998), less research has examined cultural differences in children’s trait attributions. We assessed whether Chinese participants attributed behavior to traits or situational factors. Across early and middle childhood, American children tend to be person-focused (Rholes, 1982; Seiver, Gopnik, & Goodman, 2013) whereas Eastern Asian children consider contextual information in emotion judgments (Kuwabara, Son, & Smith, 2011) and view traits as more flexible than their American peers (Lockhart, Nakashima, Ingaki, & Keil, 2008). Therefore, Chinese children may prefer situational over trait explanations for behavior.
Eighty Chinese 4- to 7-year-olds (M = 5.98 years, SD = 11.88 months) from Hangzhou, China, heard about actors who engaged in positive or negative behavior (e.g., sharing vs. refusing to help). These outcomes were crossed with positive or negative situational factors (e.g., being sad vs. happy) to produce four story types: positive factor-positive outcome (PP), negative factor-positive outcome (NP), positive factor-negative outcome (PN), and negative factor-negative outcome (NN). For example, in one PP story, participants heard that a girl was happy because her mother was returning from a trip; later at school, a classmate asked this girl for help and she obliged. Participants were asked, “Did X act this way because she’s happy her mom is returning after a long trip (score = 0) or because she’s a nice person (score = 1)?” Participants’ total outcome response score was out of six.
A 2 (age: 4- to 5- year-olds vs. 6- to 7-year-olds) x 4 (story type: PP, NP, PN, NN) mixed ANOVA on outcome responses revealed a significant main effect of story type, F(2.67, 200.09) = 41.23, p < 0.001, ƞ2 = 0.04. In direct alignment with research findings with American children, participants attributed behavioral outcomes to traits rather than situations at a rate significantly above chance except for NN stories (Table 1). There was no main effect of age group nor an interaction with story type (ps.> .1) Overall, trait attributions held across combinations of valenced information, but were weaker for NN stories.
Chinese children prioritized traits over situational causes when explaining both positive and negative outcomes, which suggests that some social situations may inherently prompt behavior-to-trait inferences (e.g., Chen, Corriveau, & Harris, 2016). These findings challenge traditional ideas that individuals from Eastern Asian cultures make holistic evaluations of social situations (Ji, Lee, Guo, 2010). In addition, Eastern Asian children tend to be optimistic that negative traits will change (Lockhart et al., 2008), which suggests that a preference for trait explanations may weaken across development, particularly for the evaluation of negative behavior. Indeed, children in this study made fewer trait attributions when both the situational factor and behavioral outcome were negative.

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