The Role of Moral Sensitivity in Children's Trait Reasoning

It is now presumed that even young children engage in trait attribution, but psychologists have yet to articulate factors affecting the development of this social cognition skill. A potentially important factor is children's attention to moral sensitivity. The current investigation is the first to examine whether moral sensitivity influences trait attribution in preschoolers and to do so using measures requiring trait inferences from behaviors conflicting on the same dimension (e.g., nice/mean). Specifically, the research addressed whether young children's trait reasoning differed depending on whether an actor's observed behaviors were morally valenced (nice/mean) or morally neutral (clean/messy) and also whether reasoning differed for behaviors that were simply positive (nice/clean) or negative (mean/messy). Three-, 4-, 5-year-olds, and adults (n's = 16, 27, 22, and 20, respectively), were told (and shown sketches) of four children who each exhibited a series of five behaviors: One described a child that was mostly mean (i.e., exhibited 4 mean behaviors and 1 nice behavior), one that was mostly nice, one mostly messy, and one mostly clean. After hearing each description, participants were asked a series of questions, such as "Is this girl nice or mean?" and "Will this girl help or not help someone tomorrow?," to elicit trait attributions and trait-related judgments. A third of the children failed to attend to the 4:1 behavior frequency evidence at all, suggesting that extant literature has overestimated young children's trait reasoning abilities. Analyses of data from the remaining children and adults revealed age-related increases in trait reasoning as well as some evidence that reasoning varied for morally neutral versus morally valenced behaviors, especially in children, and that evaluative judgments (e.g., liking someone) varied for positive and negative behaviors. Implications for a more accurate and refined description of the development of trait reasoning are discussed.