Children's impressions of moral and conventional transgressors.

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Abstract
Two studies examine children''s inferences of personality for actors engaging in different domains of behavior. In both studies, 12 boys and 12 girls at each of the 1st, 4th and 7th grades were given 2 descriptions of actors engaging in either moral or conventional transgressions. In study 1, subjects were asked to describe the transgressor, responses were content analyzed for the proportion and type of psychological statements (traits, behavioral patterns and attitudes and intentions). Subjects at the 3 age levels inferred personality dispositions from descriptions of behavior; whereas there were no age differences in the proportion of psychological constructs, different types of psychological statements characterized descriptions of moral and conventional actors. Children described moral transgressors in interpersonal, relational trait terms with increasing age, whereas children described conventional transgressors by traits that reflect deviance from standards in middle childhood and by inferences of attitudes and preferences in early adolescence. In study 2, children were given the same descriptions of actors'' behavior and predicted 8 future positive and negative moral and conventional behaviors and rated the actors on eight traits matched to the prediction situations. Subjects at all ages predicted that transgressors would be more likely to engage in future same-domain transgressions than either positive or negative events in the other domain; these, in turn, were seen as more likely than positive acts in the stimulus domain. A similar pattern was observed in children''s trait ratings. Children''s concepts of persons evidently are inferred from information regarding behavior and differentiated by conceptual domain in middle childhood and early adolescence; furthermore, the content of these impressions changes with age.