Children's Evaluation of Other People's Self-Descriptions.

Children's evaluations of what people communicate about themselves were examined in three studies with a total of 296 participants (aged four to 12). Participants heard scenarios in which characters' motivations to reveal truthful information were systematically manipulated to examine (1) children's understanding that people do not always reveal true information, and (2) children's use of contextual cues to judge the credibility of what individuals say about themselves. Results from Study 1 suggest that elementary school children are quite sophisticated at reasoning with reference to motive information. Study 2 suggests that preschool children can also make use of motive information that is salient and familiar. For example, even preschool children responded that boys are less likely than girls to reveal to peers that they like to play with dolls. Study 3 suggests that children's reasoning about self-presentation is linked to their beliefs about social acceptability norms.

Preschool children's reasoning about ability.

Young children's reasoning about ability was investigated among 155 preschoolers (M = 4 years, 10 months) across 3 studies. Results suggest that preschoolers are sensitive to mental state information when making judgments about another child's ability: They judged a child who finds a task easy to be smarter than one who finds the same task hard. Systematic patterns of errors on recall tasks suggest that preschoolers perceive positive correlations between (a) exerting effort and experiencing academic success, and (b) being nice and having high academic ability. Results from a comparison group of forty 9- to 10-year-olds (M = 9 years, 10 months) suggest that the preschool findings generally reflect emerging patterns of reasoning about ability that persist into later childhood, but that the perceived correlations between high effort and academic outcomes and between social and academic traits diminish with age.