Gail D. Heyman - US grants

In the research proposed here, we hope to add to our knowledge of how children use different types of information to make psychological inferences. Specifically we will examine the following three questions: 1. What is the developmental course of children's ability to understand traits in a psychologically meaningful way? 2. How does information processing of social information compare to processing of information in other domains? 3. To what extent do children view traits as stable versus malleable and what aspects of parental input might contribute to such beliefs?

Researchers studying achievement motivation have shown that the way individuals think about ability can have important implications for learning and motivation. However, many unanswered questions about the nature, development, and consequences of ability conceptions remain. The proposed research examines these and related issues among children ages 4 through 10. I describe three sets of studies designed to address the following questions: l) What is the nature of young children's conceptions of ability and how do these conceptions change with development? 2) What factors serve to systematically shape ability conceptions? 3) What individual differences in ability conceptions are evident, and what are their antecedents and consequences? The proposed research looks at these questions using theories and methodologies from within psychology, including cognitive and social development, and from disciplines outside of psychology, such as anthropology and sociology, which focus on larger social systems. Together, these studies should provide a nuanced picture of the way in which children of different ages reason about ability, the factors affecting their reasoning, and the motivational consequences.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An international team of researchers will collaborate to investigate how North American and Eastern Asian children acquire the concepts of lying and the associated moral values. In contrast to most studies that mainly involve Western children, our experimental strategy is to sample school-aged children from US, Canada, P.R. China, and Japan. This comparative approach allows us to identify cross-cultural similarities and differences in children's moral understanding of dishonesty, and to determine the extent to which such understanding is shaped by children's unique cultural experiences. We will test a basic hypothesis that because the North American and Eastern Asian cultures emphasize differentially individualism and collectivism, children's moral conception of honesty and dishonesty will be different in these cultures. Three experimental series will systematically examine whether North American and East Asian children categorize untruthful statements as lies and give positive or negative ratings to them when the statements are told (a) to be modest, (b) to be polite, or (c) to benefit another individual or a collective. A fourth experimental series will compare the moral conceptions of lying and truth-telling in East Asian children born and raised in North America, East Asian children raised in East Asia, and Non-East Asian children raised in North America. This comparison examines the relative influence of the macro (school) - and micro- (home) cultural environments on children's moral conceptions of lying. The theoretical significance of our project is to provide a cross-cultural perspective on current research regarding the development of truth- and lie-telling, to delineate cultural factors contributing to the formation of moral values in the domain of verbal communication, and ultimately to form an integrated, cross-cultural account of the development of honesty and dishonesty in children. Practically, knowledge about the normal development of children's moral conceptions of lying can provide mental health professionals with useful information for assessing and treating atypical children from different cultural backgrounds who have conduct disorders, of which dishonesty is one major symptom. Also, this research will offer educators much needed information regarding culturally sensitive strategies to teach children about honesty and lying. In the legal domain, our findings can assist legal practitioners in developing culturally sensitive procedures to assess child witnesses' competence and credibility in courts of law. [unreadable] [unreadable]