The Relationship between Spontaneous Trait Inferences and Spontaneous Situational Inferences: A Developmental Approach

Findings in a long history of social perception research have revealed that, when observing others' actions, people who are perceivers often make inferences spontaneously (unintentionally and unconsciously). For instance, there is a large body of research in which the results have shown that people who are observers often form spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) from brief observations of trait-implying behaviors (Carlston, 2014; Schneid, Carlston, & Skowronski, 2015; Wang, Xia, & Yang, 2015; Yan, Wang, & Zhang, 2012). In addition, findings reported in studies have shown that perceivers readily extract situational information from behaviors, a process called spontaneous situational inferences (SSIs; see e.g., Ham & Vonk, 2003). More importantly, in recent studies it has been shown that STIs and SSIs can co-occur for the same behavior, implying both trait and situational properties (Kestemont, Vandekerckhove, Ma, Van Hoeck, & Van Overwalle, 2013; Ramos, Garcia-Marques, Hamilton, Ferreira, & Van Acker, 2012; Uleman, Rim, Saribay, & Kressel, 2012). Thus, when reading that X got full marks in the test, people activate both "smart" and "easy" spontaneously.However, studies on the co-occurrence of STIs and SSIs have been performed only with adults, and little attention has been given to why and how spontaneous inferences develop. Some researchers (Shimizu, 2012; Uleman, Newman, & Moskowitz, 1996) have argued that long-term practice with specific social judgments leads to their automatization and proceduralization. Consistent with this claim, it is certainly possible that social inferences become progressively more automatic through practice (Pomerantz & Newman, 2000). In other words, scholars consider that the development of STIs and SSIs is contingent on the experience of the individual in using traits and situations to interpret behaviors.The findings in studies generally have indicated that, for young children (that is, before the age of 7 or 8 years; see Gonzalez, Zosuls, & Ruble, 2010), traits play a less significant role in person perception than when the child is older. Instead, young children are sensitive to situational determinants of behavior (Gonzalez et al., 2010). Starting around the age of 7 or 8 years, children begin to understand traits in relation to mental entities (Yuill & Pearson, 1998). Zhang and Wang (2013) demonstrated that Chinese children could make STIs from the age of 8 years. From these findings, together with the co-occurrence of STIs and SSIs, we reasoned that it could be proposed that SSIs develop by the age of 8 at the latest. By 10 or 11 years, children are particularly rigid trait theorists (Shantz, 1983). Children at this age have a strong tendency to engage in trait inferences from behaviors and are more prone to neglecting situational constraints in their inferences compared to earlier or later in their lives (Pomerantz & Newman, 2000). But after middle childhood (10-11 years), adolescents do not perceive unreasonable high correlations between behavior and traits and they make attributions incorporating information about both dispositional and situational factors (see Newman, 1991). It is possible that adolescents make attributions using information about both trait and situational factors. Given age differences observed in how a person behaves, we reasoned that, unlike adolescents, children aged 10 or 11 years may be more likely to make STIs than they would be to make SSIs.Expanding on the previous research, we examined the relationship between the strength of tendency to make STIs and the strength of tendency to make SSIs among three groups of Chinese children and adolescents aged 8, 11, and 14 years, respectively. Our aim was to establish at what age children start to spontaneously infer situations from behavior. We expected that the 8-year-olds would make both STIs and SSIs; that the children aged 11 years would be more likely to make STIs than SSIs; and that the differences between the tendency to make STIs and SSIs might disappear or be reversed among the 14-year-old adolescent group. …