A developmental approach to the process of automatic social cognition

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The present study investigated the developmental process of spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) by comparing children and adults. STI is an effortless and implicit process and occurs even when people are not instructed to make such inferences and when people do not have an explicit goal of trait inference. Previous studies had investigated the occurrences of STIs only among adults, so the developmental process of STIs has not been clear.In this study 276 fifth-graders, 205 seventh-graders, and 390 adults participated in five experiments using a false recognition paradigm and a relearning paradigm. The results suggested that STIs occurred from 9 years of age at the latest. In addition, it was indicated that STIs from behaviors that imply negative traits occur more frequently compared to STIs from behaviors that imply positive traits, and that this negativity effect was shown among children as well as adults.