A Study On The Development Of Children's Trait Beliefs

The study examined how children's trait beliefs develop with their grown-up. Subjects are randomly drawn out, including 31 kindergarteners (17 boys and 14 girls, m 5y7.7m), 30 grade 2 pupils (16boys and 14girls, m 7y7.3m), and 31 grade 4 pupils (16 boys and 15girls, m 9y9.7m).The study includes 3 experiments. In experiment 1, we investigate what trait words children usually use by asking them to discribe the persons they like and dislike in the interview. In experiment 2, we examine whether children understand the trait words in the adult way by two sections. One is called lebel, in which we give children the descriptions about some kind of behaviors adherent to some traits and ask children which traits these descriptions are talking about. The other is called description, in which we ask children to describe the typical performances of traits. In experiment 3, we examine what kind of trait beliefs children hold on, entity belief or incremental belief? experiment 3 consists of 3 sections. In the first section, we examine what trait beliefs children hold on negative traits. In the second section, we examine what trait beliefs children hold on positive traits. And in the third section, we examine what beliefs children hold on the control of the expression of traits.The results show that, (a) on the number of positive and negative trait words that were elicited, subjects have no significant gender difference, but have significant group differences. That is, with the age increased, children speak out much more trait words, both positive and negative. And children report much more positive trait words than negative trait words.(b) There are high correlation and significant difference between children's generalization ability tested in section A and children's description ability tested in section B; although children's generalization ability and description ability develop with age at the same time, children's description ability is usually at the higher level.(c) Most of children hold incremental belief on negative traits and belive that positive traits always could turn to be positive. Relatively, younger kindergarteners tend to believe that traits are much more incremental and individuals have much more control on the expression of traits, while older children tend to believe that traits are less incremental and individuals have less control on the expression of traits.