Do young children use the discounting principle?

JOURNAL

OF EXPERIMENTAL

SOCIAL

PSYCHOLOGY

28,

572-593 (1992)

Do Young Children Use the Discounting Principle? LEONARD

S. NEWMAN

Case Western

Reserve

University

AND

DIANE New York

N.

RUBLE University

Received January 24, 1992 According to the discounting principle, the perceived role of a given cause in leading to a given effect is diminished when other possible causes for that event are also detected. Use of this principle is believed to underlie the overjustification effect: when people are pressured to engage in an enjoyable activity, their intrinsic motivation decreases. However, overjustification effects have been documented in young children, even though past research indicates that children less than 78 years of age do not use or understand the discounting principle. This research reexamines this paradox. Past discounting studies have ignored evidence that young children often prefer entity to person causes of behavior. The two experiments reported here demonstrate that when tested appropriately, even young children use the discounting principle and can apply it to their understanding of an overjustification-type situation. Results are discussed in terms of the attributional mediation of behavior and the importance of taking into account the nature of subjects’ social knowledge when examining their use of attributional principles. 0 1992 Academic

Press. Inc.

The study of attributional processes is based on the assumption that attributional processes guide behavior. For example, whether or not we attribute someone’s unpleasant behavior to person factors will affect how we later behave toward that person (Hazlewood & Olson, 1986). Behavior This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 37215, NICHD Grant 20807, and Research Scientist Development Award 004&I to Diane Ruble. Experiment 1 was run with the assistance of Andrea Hannold, Lory Molino, and David Rabb. We also thank Faith Greulich for her help in conducting both experiments. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Leonard Newman, Case Western Reserve University, Psychology Department, Mather Memorial, Cleveland, OH 44106 572 0022-1031/92 $5.00 Copyright 0 1992 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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and attitudes are affected by attributions we make for our own behavior as well. When people are pressured in some way to engage in an activity that they already find interesting, they subsequently demonstrate less interest in that activity, even when the pressure takes the form of a reward (e.g., Deci, 1971; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973). Kelley’s (1973) discounting principle, derived from his multiple sufficient cause (MSC) schema, provides a coherent explanation for this much replicated overjustification effect (see Lepper & Greene, 1978). According to the discounting principle, the perceived role of a given cause in leading to a given effect is diminished when other possible causes for that event are also perceived to be present. External pressure can thus “overjustify” behavior, which leads one to discount one’s own intrinsic interest as a cause for engaging in it. The robustness of the overjustification effect has important implications for the workplace and the classroom, but it has also received quite a bit of attention in recent years due to a paradox in the literature. On the one hand, the phenomenon has been demonstrated with children as young as 3-4 years of age. Lepper et al. (1973), for example, found that preschoolers presented with a “Good Player” award for using magic markers were later less interested than their classmates in using them to draw pictures. On the other hand, studies assessing children’s understanding of the attributional logic said to underlie the effect (e.g., Karniol & Ross, 1976; Shultz, Butkowsky, Pearce, & Shanfield, 1975; Smith, 1975) have found that prior to the age of 8 or so, children do not seem to use it to reason about behavior. And those studies more directly examining the relationship between use of the discounting principle and the overjustifying of behavior have demonstrated that the same young children who do not use the discounting principle are still susceptible to the undermining effects of rewards and other external constraints on their behavior (Morgan, 1981; Wells & Shultz, 1980; for a review see Kassin & Lepper, 1984). The overjustification effect is perhaps the most commonly cited example of how causal attribution processes can underlie what might otherwise be puzzling aspects of behavior. But the difficulty attribution theorists have in accounting for the behavior of young children makes the phenomenon a less compelling example than it might be. We believe, however, that the developmental paradox can be resolved. Theoretically guided research on causal attribution is ultimately concerned with the status of abstract attributional principles, but rarely are these principles actually presented to subjects in the abstract. Instead, the elements of attributional problems are “dressed up” so that they can take the form of concrete social events. The particular content might be determined by whatever domain of interpersonal behavior is of specific interest to the investigator. Alternatively, the social situations and behaviors selected are simply those the investigator assumes will be familiar and engaging to the subjects under

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study. Such content must be carefully chosen, because the content of those materials may sometimes be inappropriate for assessing a given person’s attributional abilities. The thesis of this paper is that the materials used in previous research to examine discounting have been constructed without sufficient consideration of the nature of children’s social knowledge. Though it is tempting to reify attributional principles, a person’s social judgments are dependent not only on formal logic, but on contentspecific social knowledge (Costanzo & Dix, 1983; Kassin & Lepper, 1984; Miller & Aloise, 1990). This may be a particularly critical issue in research with children. The paradox in the overjustification literature may be less of a paradox than it seems.’ Developments

in Social Attribution:

Causal Loci, Causal Constructs

Smith (1975) was among the first to study children’s use of the discounting principle when making social judgments. The following is an example of the type of question he posed to his subjects: Judy was at home and two toys were there: a ball and a puzzle. Judy’s mother was there and she said that Judy could have some cake if she played with the ball. And Judy played with the ball. Susie was at her house, and two toys were there: a ball and a puzzle. And Susie played with the ball. Which girl wanted to play with the ball, Judy or Susie?

Smith’s materials, with minor changes, were adopted by many subsequent researchers seeking to extend his results (e.g., Karniol & Ross, 1976; Miller, 1985; Morgan, 1981; cc Kassin & Gibbons, 1981; Shultz & Butkowsky, 1977). The results of these studies consistently show that young children (kindergarten through second grade subjects, typically) do not reason in line with the discounting principle. In addition, the responses of young children in some experiments seem to imply that they may be more likely to use an additive rule: that is, they infer that extrinsic reasons for engaging in an activity indicate more liking for that activity (Cohen, Gelfand, & Hartmann, 1981; Karniol & Ross, 1976; Miller, 1985). However, evidence for use of the additive rule-a judgmental heuristic opposite to normative adult reasoning, yet equally cognitively complex-has been inconsistent (Miller & Aloise, 1990; Pryor, Rholes, Ruble, & Kriss, 1984). Some have argued that children’s discounting abilities have been par’ Though some research provides fairly direct support for the mediating role of causal attributions in the overjustification effect (e.g., Pittman, Cooper, & Smith, 1977), alternative nonattributional accounts have also been proposed (Boggiano & Hertel, 1983; Deci & Ryan, 1980; Pretty & Seligman, 1984). The present experiments arc not meant to provide evidence for the hypothesis that the discounting principle must underlie the effect, but only that it could be a mediator for young children.

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tially obscured by problems they may have interpreting the materials used in these studies or the questions they are asked. For example, one generally consistent finding (e.g., Cohen et al., 1981; Karniol & Ross, 1976; Kassin & Ellis, 1988) has been that young children are more likely to discount when the external constraint involved is a command to participate in some activity rather than a reward for doing so. Karniol and Ross (1979) suspected that the manipulative intent of people offering rewards may not always be obvious to young children. Indeed, they found that when manipulative intentions were made more salient, children were more likely to discount intrinsic motivation as a cause of behavior. Dalenberg, Bierman, and Furman (1984) focused instead on how 5-year-olds interpret requests to guess how much others “like” activities or “want” to play with toys. They suggest that young children may not understand that the experimenter is implicitly asking for an assessment of intrinsic motivation. Instead, these subjects may assume they are being asked a question about “total” motivation. The implications of Dalenberg et al.‘s hypothesis is that those findings indicating use of an additive rule may simply be due to young children’s belief that they have been asked to add together intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. To test this idea, subjects in their study were presented with stories about children rewarded for engaging in various activities, but were then asked not about “liking” or “wanting” but what they thought the story character would do later on when no reward was available. Results were somewhat consistent with their line of reasoning, although as they acknowledge, the direction of the differences between cell means that led to the statistical significance of their predicted effect were “not predicted by any existing theory” (p. 578). Our analysis of young children’s difficulties with the typical procedure for assessing discounting is in the spirit of the Karniol & Ross (1979) and Dalenberg ef. al. (1984) critiques. However, we focus on an aspect of the procedure that is perhaps a bit more subtle: the nature of the causal attribution that these materials require. To apply the discounting principle to the scenario presented above, a certain kind of attribution must be made: a person attribution. Subjects must decide to which person they should attribute more interest in the activity (ballplaying in this case). It is probable, though, that young children make no such attribution nor even consider making one until the experimenter asks them to do so. When given a choice between a person cause (“something about the person”) or an entity cause (“something about the object”), young children often prefer to explain behavior in terms of entity causes (Higgins & Bryant, 1982; Ruble, Feldman, Higgins, & Karlovac, 1979; Shantz, 1983). And although recent research has shown that it may be inaccurate to conclude that young children will always prefer external causes for behavior over internal/psychological ones (Lillard & Flavell, 1990; Miller & Aloise, 1989), this generalization seems to hold when the behavior in

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question involves choosing some object or activity or stating a preference-precisely the kind of behavior presented in the typical discounting study. Miller and Aloise (1989) present several possible reasons for such an entity bias in young children. For example, when one’s behavior is closely tied in time and space to an object (as is the case when playing with a toy), causal rules of temporal and spatial contiguity should encourage an entity attribution. In fact, Higgins and Bryant (1982) argue that it is impossible to encode the act of choosing some object or activity without actually referring to that object or activity. In addition, characteristics of objects are likely to remain more stable over time and situations than are characteristics of people. They are thus more predictable as causes. Given all these factors, and given young children’s general lack of experience with response variability across persons (Higgins & Bryant, 1982) 5-and 6-year-olds are likely to believe that the attractiveness of an activity or object determines both whether or not one will choose it and how enjoyable it is. Among older children and adults, on the other hand, there is a bias toward person attributions; they are more likely to believe that preferences are due to personal taste and other internal factors (see Jones, 1990). This is in part due to their greater exposure to individual response variability (Higgins & Bryant, 1982). In addition, it is a function of their understanding of and reliance on stable dispositional causes for behavior. When older children in discounting experiments are asked which of two people is more favorably disposed toward a certain type of object or activity, responding in a way consistent with the MSC schema may involve comparing the inferred stable and trait-like qualities of two peopleespecially when the question asked is “who really liked” the activity (e.g., Karniol & Ross, 1976, Experiment 2; 1979; Pryor et al., 1984). Unfortunately, not only are such person causes not preferred by young children, but stable dispositional concepts may not even be cognitively available to them (Livesley & Bromley, 1973; Rholes & Ruble, 1984). When children younger than 7-8 years of age are asked to describe other people or predict their behavior, stable dispositional concepts are notable in their absence (for a review, see Rholes, Newman, & Ruble, 1990). In conclusion, young children’s lack of facility with stable dispositional causes of behavior has further militated against their giving answers in previous experiments consistent with the discounting principle. To sum up the preceding in concrete terms, let us focus on the probable reactions of 5-to 6-year-old children to the above story about Judy and Susie. They are likely to infer that both girls played with the ball in part because it was attractive. They are also likely to understand that the behavior of Judy’s mother may have constituted pressure to play with the ball, for as Miller (1985) has demonstrated, even preschoolers understand the effects on behavior of parental pressure and bribes. And although

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577

this information may be integrated in some way consistent with the MSC schema, these subjects will probably not infer that some special internal quality of Susie has led her to choose playing with the ball and not the puzzle. Nor will they conclude that Susie is the type of person who consistently enjoys doing this kind of thing and Judy is not. But of course, the question they are subsequently asked forces them to make such a judgment. Previous investigations of the development of the MSC schema have thus not taken into account the evidence that young children are more likely to believe that behavior is more likely to be determined by certain causal factors (the attractiveness of objects, overt external pressure) rather than others (person factors, especially dispositional ones). The experiments described below do so, and examine subjects’ responses to a mutated form of the classic discounting question. Rather than comparing the interest in some activity of two hypothetical children, one of whom has been pressured to engage in the activity, some subjects are asked to compare the probable attractiveness of two hypothetical toys, one that a child has played with spontaneously, and one which that same child had to be pressured to play with. In the latter case, the causes subjects have to relate to each other to “correctly” discount are two that they should focus on spontaneously: activity/object attractiveness and external constraints. To again be concrete: a 5-to &year-old learning that Judy played with a toy will infer that that toy is attractive. When learning that Judy also played with another toy, but only after she was pressured to do so, he/she will perceive that the pressure was a sufficient cause for playing with the toy, and may then use that information to discount the role of the attractiveness of the latter toy as a cause of Judy’s playing with it. This same process, of course, could underlie the overjustification effect itself in young children. In fact, the choice subjects are asked to make by the “mutated” question may actually be closer to the one they must make in typical overjustification studies. Subjects in those experiments are not asked to make distinctions among people, but to decide which activity to engage in or which toy to play with. Of central interest is whether the revised materials will better tap young children’s abilities to use the discounting principle. At a more theoretical level, the goal is to demonstrate that any investigation of the use of attributional principles must take into account the nature of subjects’ social knowledge-in this case, their knowledge of causal constructs and the relative importance they attach to them. It should be noted that there have been a handful of published reports of successful application of the MSC schema by children of kindergarten age or younger. Generally these experiments have involved radical changes in the procedure used in other discounting studies. Shultz, Wells, and Sarda (1980) found that when the external causes involved are visible and concrete, even 3-year-olds will be less likely to attribute behavior to

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internal causes. For example, they will attribute a knee jerk reflex to a tap on the knee. But as Miller and Aloise (1989) suggest, the competing internal causes in that study-e.g., intending to jerk one’s leg-were not just uncertain but also perhaps implausible. Kassin and Gibbons (1981) created a perceptual analog of a discounting story and found that kindergarteners perceived greater “intrinsic motivation” in animated geometric shapes that appeared to move without the assistance of other objects. Lepper, Sagotsky, Dafoe, and Greene (1982) and Aloise and Miller (1991) found that even preschoolers will discount interest in an activity presented as a mean relative to an activity presented as an end. The current experiments are meant to demonstrate that children younger than 7-8 years of age can discount at greater than chance levels even when the testing procedure closely mirrors the one used in previous studies in which older children took into account social pressures to infer the presence of invisible and abstract properties while younger children did not. Overview and Predictions Younger and older children were presented with vignettes and questions designed to assess their understanding of the discounting principle. Some subjects-in what will henceforth be referred to as the “person-focus” condition-were tested with materials similar to those introduced by Smith (1975). Others, in the “entity-focus” condition, were presented with stories and questions which lead to a comparison between objects, as described above. Finally some subjects in the first investigation (in the “prediction” condition) were presented with person-focus vignettes but responded to questions about the target persons’ probable future behavior. The purpose of this last condition was to reexamine Dalenberg et al.% (1984) account for the failure of young children in past studies to demonstrate an understanding of the discounting principle. It was predicted that younger subjects in the entity-focus condition would do more discounting than those in the person-focus condition. In addition, as numerous other studies have found that children younger than 8 or so do not consistently predict future behavior to be in line with the dispositional implications of past behavior (Rholes et al., 1990), we expected that younger subjects in the entity-focus condition would also discount more than those in the prediction condition. These predictions can be expressed in a strong and weak form. The strong prediction is that this pattern of results will express itself as a significant Age group by Question type (entity-focus, person-focus, or prediction) interaction. The weak prediction is simply that older subjects will demonstrate greater than chance discounting for all three question types while younger subjects will do so only in the entity-focus condition.

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EXPERIMENT

PRINCIPLE

579

1

Method Subjects. Subjects were 45 (20 male, 25 female) kindergarten and 45 (21 male, 24 female) fourth-grade children recruited from private and parochial schools in New York City and tested individually in their schools. Exact birthdates were available for 36 subjects in each age group. The mean age of those kindergarten subjects was 5.6 years and for the fourth graders 9.6 years. Materials and procedure. It was important to ensure that subjects in the entity-focus condition did not base their judgment of which toys were more fun to play with on their a priori attitudes toward different toys (i.e., the balls, puzzles, toy airplanes typically described in such stories). Therefore, the toys children learned about were identified only by location. In the first story pair, subjects were told that there were toys in a blue closet and toys in a white closet; in the second pair, that there were toys in a green box and toys in a black box; in the third, some toys were on a yellow shelf and others on a brown shelf; and finally, subjects were told about toys in a red drawer and toys in an orange drawer. Audiotapes containing four pairs of stories were prepared. Each pair consisted of one about a child playing with some toys when this activity was associated with some constraint and another story about the same or another child (depending on condition) playing with toys unconstrained in any way. Half of the time this constraint was a command (he/she “must play with the toys”), and half the time it was the offer of a reward (“some cake/ice cream”); half the time the constrainer was an adult, and half the time it was a peer. Subjects presented with the story pairs in Order 1 heard stories in the following order: reward/adult constrainer, command/peer constrainer, reward/peer, and command/adult. Subjects presented with Order 2 heard command/adult, reward/peer, command/peer, and reward/adult stories. Also counterbalanced within subjects with constraint type was Story Order (i.e., constrained or unconstrained behavior in the first story of a pair). Sex of target child (or target children in the person-focus and prediction conditions) was counterbalanced with identity of constrainer (adult or peer). Finally, in Order 1 the constrained toys were in or on the blue closet, green box, yellow shelf, and red drawer, while in Order 2 the toys in or on the white closet, black box, brown shelf, and orange drawer were the ones target children were commanded or bribed to play with. Preliminary analyses indicated no main effect for Order, nor did this variable interact with Age or Question Type. Analyses of the Story Order variable revealed only a slight tendency for subjects to select the child or toys in the first story pair as the intrinsically motivated child or fun toys. This effect did not interact with Age or Question Type, nor did it emerge in Experiment 2. Therefore, neither of these counterbalancing variables will be considered further in the analyses reported below. In the person-focus and prediction conditions, subjects heard story pairs describing one child pressured in some way to play with a certain set of toys and another who played with the same toys spontaneously. After each story pair, person-focus subjects were asked which child liked the toys more. Prediction subjects’ beliefs about the relative intrinsic motivation of the children in the stories was assessed by asking which boy or girl was more likely to freely decide to play with the toys at a later point in time. In the entity-focus condition, subjects heard story pairs in which a child was pressured to play with a certain set of toys on one day and freely chose to play with another set of toys on a previous or later day. After each story pair, these subjects were asked which of the toys were more likely to be fun to play with. Table 1 presents examples of stories and questions from each Question Type condition. All stories were presented on audiotape. Before each pair, the target child or children involved were introduced by name (e.g., “NOW, I’m going to tell you about two girls, Nancy and Judy”). Pictures said to be of the children in the stories were left out while the stories describing their behavior were played, as were simple colored line drawings of the toy

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TABLE SAMPLE

STORIES

AND

1

QUESTIONS,

EXPERIMENT

1

Person focus: Judy was at home one day, and some of her toys were there. Some were in a blue closet, and some were in a white closet. And Judy played with the toys in the blue closet. Nancy was at her home, and some of her toys were there. Some were in a blue closet, and some were in a white closet. Nancy’s mother said that if she played with the toys in the blue closet, she would give her some cake. And Nancy played with the toys in the blue closet. -Which girl really liked to play with the toys in the blue closet? Prediction: Carl was at home one day, and some of his toys were there. Some were in a green box, and some were in a black box. A boy Carl was playing with said that he must play with the toys in the black box. And Carl played with the toys in the black box. David was at his home, and some of his toys were there. Some were in a green box, and some were in a black box. And David played with the toys in the black box. -A week later, Carl and David were at home again. They were alone, and could play with whatever toys they wanted to. Which boy do you think decided to play with the toys in the black box? Entity focus: Katie was at home one day, and some of her toys were there. Some were in a red drawer, and some were in an orange drawer. And Katie played with the toys in the red drawer. The next day, Katie was at home again. The toys that were in the red drawer were still in the red drawer, and the toys that were in the orange drawer were still in the orange drawer. Katie’s mother said that she must play with the toys in the orange drawer. And Katie played with the toys in the orange drawer. -Which toys do you think are more fun to play with, the toys in the red drawer or the toys in the orange drawer? locations (e.g., pictures of a blue and white closet). Subjects were asked to repeat each story after it was played (see Karniol & Ross, 1976); if in the opinion of the experimenter he or she did not repeat it back to a gist criterion, the story was replayed up to a maximum of three times (< 5% of all stories). Questions were also presented on audiotape. After making a decision, each subject indicated how sure he or she was by pointing to one of three red squares of ascending size. The smallest red square was labeled “not sure”; the next, “sort of sure”; and the largest red square was to be selected if a subject was “very sure”. All subjects were trained in the use of the scale at the beginning of the session. Finally, subjects were asked to briefly explain each of their choices*.

Results Responses were scored as + 1 if they were consistent with the discounting principle and - 1 if not. They were then weighted through mul’ Open-ended responses were not rigorously analyzed, primarily because kindergarten subjects’ responses fell mostly (65%) into a miscellaneous category that included restatements of answers, uninterpretable responses, and no responses at all. These results are not unprecedented: coherent verbal responses explicitly demonstrating understanding of the discounting principle are rare among S-to 6-year-olds, even among those whose judgments appear to reflect discounting (Kassin & Ellis, 1988; Lepper, Sagotsky, Dafoe, & Greene, 1982; for a review see Kassin & Lepper, 1984).

THE DISCOUNTING TABLE DISCOUNTING,

581

PRINCIPLE 2

AGE GROUP BY QUESTION

TYPE, EXPERIMENT

I

Question type Age group Kindergarten Fourth grade

Person focus - .27 6.53 (3.13)

Prediction -ho 3.21 (1.33)

Entity focus ho 5.33 (2.97)

(-.09) (5.04)

Note. Higher positive numbers mean more discounting. Subjects’ four responses were rated on a 0 (“not very sure”) to 2 (“very sure”) scale, so cell values can range from - 8 to +8. Fifteen subjects per cell.

tiplication by the confidence ratings (0, not sure; 1, sort of sure; 2, very sure). The resulting scores were analyzed in a 2 (Age group) x 3 (Question Type) x 2 (Subject Sex) x 2 (Constraint: command or reward) mixed analysis of variance, with the latter factor the within-subject variable. As expected, discounting scores were higher for fourth graders than kindergarten subjects (see Table 2), and this was reflected in a main effect for Age, F(1, 78) = 64.8, p < .OOl. Ignoring confidence ratings, 38 of the 45 fourth graders consistently gave discounting answers (three or four of their four responses); only four were inconsistent (two discounting answers out of four) and only three tended to give “additive” answers. In contrast, just 11 of the kindergarten subjects were consistent discounters, while 21 were inconsistent and 13 gave fewer than two discounting answers. A second main effect for constraint, E’(1, 78) = 9.1, p < .005, was qualified by an Age x Constraint interaction, F(1, 78) = 6.2, p < .025. Though the tendency of older subjects to apply the MSC schema was unaffected by the nature of the pressure exerted on target children, kindergarten subjects discounted less when a reward was involved. As can be seen in Table 3, this was true for all three question types. Finally, an uninterpretable Age x Question Type x Sex interaction, F(2, 78) = 3.2, p < .05, emerged from the analysis. Previous research on use of the discounting principle has not revealed consistent sex differences of this or any other kind. The Age x Question Type interaction did not reach conventional significance levels, F(2, 78) = 2.23, p = .ll. The strong version of the predicted results therefore was not supported3. Inspection of Table 3, however, reveals that when story pairs involved commands-and it was primarily in these cases that there was any evidence for use of the MSC ’ An analysis restricted to the person-and entity-focus conditions also failed to reveal a significant interaction.

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TABLE DISCOUNTING,

CONSTRAINT

3

BY QUESTION TYPE, KINDERGARTEN EXPERIMENT 1

SUBJECTS ONLY,

Question type Constraint

Person focus

Prediction

Entity focus

Command Reward

.67 - .93 (- .13)

.33 - .93 (- .30)

1.53* - .93 (.30)

(.W (-.93)

Note. Higher positive numbers mean more discounting. Subjects’ two responses in each cell were rated on a 0 (“not very sure”) to 2 (“very sure”) scale, so cell values can range from -4 to +4. Fifteen subjects per question type. *Greater than chance discounting, p < .05.

schema among younger subjectsAiscounting was highest for kindergarten subjects in the entity-focus condition, as expected. Furthermore, a onesample t test revealed that discounting in this and only this cell was at greater than chance levels, t(14) = 2.29, p < .05. In this cell, 8 of the 15 kindergarten subjects were consistent discounters, while 5 were inconsistent and just 2 gave mostly additive answers. The weak version of the predicted results was therefore partially supported. Preliminary analyses revealed no effects for sex of target child nor any for identity of constrainer. The latter result is a failure to replicate an effect reported by Grumet (1974, see Costanzo & Dix, 1983), who found that young children were more likely to discount when peers exerted pressure on behavior while older children were more likely to do so when adults provided the external constraint. Recent research by Aloise and Miller (1991) also shows that simply changing the identities of constrainers may not significantly affect young children’s judgments; the manipulation may also have to include explicit information about different constrainers’ possible motives. Discussion

The discrepancy between the kindergarten subjects’ interpretations of the vignettes involving commands and those involving rewards is not without precedent. As Karniol and Ross (1979) showed, younger subjects do not always perceive rewards as extrinsic constraints; that is, they do not always understand the ulterior motives behind offers of rewards. Instead, at least in some experimental contexts, they may see rewards as cues that an activity is attractive. As cogently stated by Aloise and Miller (1991, p. 72), “If children perceive no external cause, or think it signals intrinsic motivation, then there is only one potential cause. By definition, discounting could occur only when more than one possible cause is per-

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ceived. If social manipulation is not perceived, there is only one possible cause-intrinsic motivation-and thus no discounting occurs.” And more generally, young children find it difficult to integrate relatively subtle ulterior motives with other information when making postdictive judgments of the sort requested in this study (Butzin & Dozier, 1986). In contrast to the results reported by Dalenberg et al. (1984), discounting scores in the Prediction condition were actually the lowest overall, for both age groups. Though the issue raised by Dalenberg et al-the clarity of the precise question asked-is an important one, accounting for this problem does not seem to be sufficient for eliciting discounting in young children (see also Aloise & Miller, 1991). But Experiment 1 provided some support for the hypotheses-specifically, the weak form of the predictions. Fourth graders in all three conditions discounted at greater than chance levels, while this was true for kindergarten subjects only when the question was of the entity-focus type and the constraint on behavior was a command by another person. EXPERIMENT

2

Experiment 2 is a replication of Experiment 1 with a number of changes. The Prediction condition was dropped. In light of the difficulty young children seemed to have interpreting those vignettes where rewards were offered, those in Experiment 2 all involved children being ordered to play with certain toys. Also, in keeping with Costanzo and Dix’s (1983) and Aloise and Miller’s (1991) reports that young children may be less likely to discount when adults constrain behavior (despite the failure to replicate those findings above), only child constrainers were described. Finally, so as to provide more compelling support for our hypothesis that an interaction between age and question type is due to differences in beliefs and knowledge about the causes of social behavior and not other possible developmental differences, subjects in a narrower age range were recruited for the follow-up experiment. In Experiment 2, subjects were all first, second, and third graders, children in the age range where the preference for entity over person causes is beginning to reverse (Ruble & Rholes, 1981) and the development of the stable disposition concept is taking place (Rholes et al., 1990). This also permitted us to treat age as a continuous variable in some of our analyses. Method Subjects. Seventy-four subjects from local schools on Long Island participated: 24 first graders (9 boys, 15 girls; M age = 6.7 years), 24 second graders (10 boys, 14 girls; M age = 7.7 years), and 26 third graders (14 boys, 12 girls; M age = 8.6 years). The overall mean age of the subjects was 7.7 years, with a range from 6.1 to 9.2 years. All subjects were tested individually in their schools. Materials and procedure. Subjects were read either two person-focus or two entity-focus story pairs. The first pair of stories was always about a male target and the second pair

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about a female target. In each condition, the constraint appeared once in the first story of a pair, and once in the second story. As noted above, all stories involved coercion by peers to engage in behavior. Cross-cutting the Question Type manipulation was a Version variable, which simply varied the precise way the command by the target’s peer was worded. In Version 1, subjects first learned that “a boy (the target) was playing with” told him he “must” play with certain toys, while in the second story pair the target’s sister “made” her play with other toys. In the first story pair of Version 2, the target was told by his brother that he “had to” play with certain toys, and in the second story pair the target was told by “a girl who had come over to play with” her that she “had better” play with some of the toys. Otherwise, the materials and procedure were the same as in Experiment 1, except that only the blue/white closets and brown/yellow shelves were used as locations for the toys, and the stories and questions were read aloud by one of two female experimenters rather than being presented on tape. Open-ended explanations were not elicited. In addition, a five-point instead of a three-point response scale was used for confidence ratings”.

Results Responses were again scored as +1 if they were consistent with the discounting principle and - 1 if not. They were then weighted by a factor of 0 through 4 through multiplication by the confidence ratings, thus yielding scores for each judgment ranging from -4 to +4. The resulting scores were analyzed in a 3 (Grade) x 2 (Question Type) x 2 (Subject Sex) analysis of variance. A main effect of Grade emerged, F(2, 62) = 5.1, p < .Ol, but this was qualified by the predicted interaction between Grade and Question Type, F(2, 62) = 6.7, p < .005. As revealed by Table 4, first graders discounted more in the entity-focus than in the person-focus condition, a difference revealed by a simple effects analysis to be significant, F(1, 62) = 6.8, p < .025. The same was not true for third graders; in fact, they were more likely to apply the MSC schema in the person-focus than in the entity-focus condition, F(1, 62) = 5.0, p < .05. Second graders’ responses were basically intermediate, with no significant difference across question type (F < 1). To facilitate comparison to some previously reported results (e.g., Karniol & Ross, 1976), Table 5 also presents the unweighted judgment data, which basically replicate the pattern for the weighted responses. Furthermore, they reveal that every first grader in the entity focus condition gave at least one 4 The design of Experiment 2 originally called for Question Type to be treated as a withinsubjects variable. After responding to two questions of one type, all subjects responded to two of the other. However, initial analyses revealed that levels of discounting dropped sharply and significantly after the first two story pairs. This effect did not interact with age. Furthermore, the results reported below did not generalize to the second two story pairs after the switch of question type. The reason for this decrease in discounting is not clear. One possibility is that discounters interpreted the shift in the form of the stories and questions as a cue to change the nature of their responses as well (see Grice, 1975, and Schwarz, Strack, Hilton, & Naderer, 1991, on rules of conversation and the “cooperative principle of social discourse”). But data for the last two story pairs were dropped from all subsequent analvses.

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TABLE 4 GRADE BY QUESTION

TYPE, EXPERIMENT

2

Question type Grade

Person focus

Entity focus

First

-0.31 (n = 13) 4.82 (n = 11) 5.67 (n = 15) (344)

3.45 (n = 11) 3.62 (n = 13) 2.55 (n = 11) (3.23)

Second Third

(1.42) (4.17) (4.35)

Note. Higher positive numbers mean more discounting. Subjects’ two responses were rated on a 0 (“not very sure”) to 4 (“very sure”) scale, so cell values can range from -8 to +8.

discounting answer. An analysis of variance based on the unweighted data again yielded a significant effect of Grade, F(2, 62) = 8.2 p <.005, and the interaction between Grade and Question Type, F(2, 62) = 4.8, p < .05. Alternative correlational analyses treated age as a continuous variable. Within the person-focus condition, age was significantly correlated with discounting, r = .54, p < .Ol. That is, the older the subject, the more likely he or she was able to apply the discounting principle to judgments TABLE CHOICE

PATTERNS, GRADE

5

BY QUESTION

TYPE, EXPERIMENT

2

Person focus

Entity focus

First grade Consistent unconstrained Inconsistent choices Consistent constrained

23% 46 31

45% 55 0

Second grade Consistent unconstrained Inconsistent choices Consistent constrained

64% 36 0

69% 31 0

Third grade Consistent unconstrained Inconsistent choices Consistent constrained

87% 13 0

64% 27 9

Note. Numbers represent the percentage of subjects within each cell who consistently chose the constrained child or toy (two of two choices), consistently chose the unconstrained child or toy, or were inconsistent across the two story pairs.

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of this type. As expected, this was true only for the person-focus stories: within the entity-focus condition, age was insignificantly and slightly negatively correlated with discounting, r = - .13, 12s. In keeping with the analyses reported for Experiment 1, one-sample t tests were performed on cell means. Results for first-grade subjects replicated those for the kindergarten subjects in Experiment 1: discounting was greater than chance for the entity-focus subjects, t(l0) = 3.2, p < .05, but not for the person-focus subjects, t(12)< 1. As expected, the older children discounted at greater than chance levels in both conditions, with the exception of subjects in the third-grade/entity-focus cell, where t(l0) = 2.1, p = .059. Finally, as in Experiment 1, an effect involving subject sex emerged. A supplementary analysis indicated that subjects were more likely to discount when the story protagonists were of their own sex: when the story was about a boy or boys, males discounted more than females (2.3 vs 0.7), while the opposite was true when the story concerned a girl or girls (female subjects = 2.4 vs males = 1.3). A 2 (Subject sex) x 2 (Protagonist sex) ANOVA showed these differences to be significant, F(1, 72) = 10.4, p < .005, for the interaction. This interesting yet unpredicted sex effect (which was not found in Experiment 1) also did not interact with Question Type5. Discussion Experiment 2 provided stronger support for the hypotheses, conforming to the strong form of the predicted results. Younger subjects, but not older ones, showed greater appreciation of the discounting principle in the entity-focus condition-that is, when the key comparison subjects were asked to make was between objects, not people. In the entity-focus condition the difference in discounting between older and younger subjects actually disappeared. As discussed above, the entity-focus question type is a mutated version of the person-focus question, but it was designed to be similar in structure to the latter question type. To respond to the “classic” discounting question, subjects must compare two children in terms of their interest in a particular toy or activity. To respond to the new question, subjects must compare two sets of toys that have been played with by the same child in terms of their attractiveness. Therefore, to respond to the question 5 Another measure, similar to the one used by Rholes and Ruble (1984) and meant to directly tap understanding of the stable disposition concept, was also administered. The expected age differences were found, but these data did not add to interpretation of the discounting results. Though this measure is still being developed and validated, these findings suggest that for this paradigm developmental changes in perceived loci of causality may play a more critical role than associated changes in the use of stable trait concepts to understand behavior.

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posed to them, subjects in the two conditions must take into account events involving either two children and one toy or two toys and one child. One might argue, however, that the stories in the person-focus condition are more complex, because overall the stories in that condition involve two children and two toys. If so, these stories may have required a heavier cognitive load that primarily affected younger subjects. Two findings argue against this alternative explanation of the findings. First of all, the significant differences in discounting between third graders in the two conditions of Experiment 2 suggest that the results involved more than just the processing demands of the different question types. Third graders in the entity-focus condition actually discounted less than those in the person-focus condition. But even more compelling are the data on story repeats. As noted above, subjects had to repeat back each story after it was presented, and if he or she did not do so accurately, the story was read again. The number of repeats was recorded by the experimenter, and across all subjects and conditions in Experiment 2 each story had to be repeated an average of 0.6 times. A more complete analysis of these data revealed no significant effects of Grade or Question type and no significant interaction between these two variables. These results suggest that the results of Experiment 2 are not a function of the relative difficulty subjects had in comprehending stories in the different conditions. Kassin and Ellis (1988, Experiment 2) recently presented findings from a study utilizing a procedure quite similar to that of the experiments reported here. In contrast to the results reported here, they found lower levels of discounting among both 5-to 6-year-olds and fourth graders when the materials used for examining the MSC schema were modified. Close examination, however, reveals differences between the entity-focus questions described here and Kassin and Ellis’s Task 1 and suggests that the latter may not have been as close an analogue to the “classic” discounting procedure. In the vignettes presented by Smith (1975), like those in the present study’s person-focus condition and Kassin and Ellis’s similar Task 2, it is explicitly stated that though two children encounter the toy in question in different social circumstances, both children play with the toy. Similarly, in the present study’s entity-focus condition, subjects are explicitly told that despite the fact that behavior was constrained on one day and unconstrained on the next, both sets of toys were played with. In contrast, the vignettes that made up Kassin and Ellis’s Task 1 do not include such information; in fact subjects were led to believe that target children had to choose between a constrained and unconstrained toy, although the choice was not revealed. Given previous studies demonstrating how even young children understand that people are responsive to external pressure and incentives (Butzin & Dozier, 1986, Experiment 2; Miller, 1985), we can presume that subjects inferred that the target child played only with the constrained toy. Thus there was arguably a

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confound between constraint and actual playing time or performance of task. Further complicating matters is the fact that in the Kassin and Ellis experiment, Task was confounded with order. The entity-type questions (or Task 1) always preceded the person-type questions (Task 2). Note, however, that the overall direction of this order effect was opposite to one found in the present experiment (see Footnote 4). Ultimately, then, the importance of these subtle methodological differences must be evaluated by future research. GENERAL

DISCUSSION

These experiments illustrate how social knowledge must be taken into account when constructing materials to use in examining attributional logic. Even 6-year-olds can reason in accord with the MSC schema, it appears, so long as the causes they must take into account are those they are comfortable using to comprehend their social worlds. And these results suggest a solution to the developmental paradox noted above. How can young children be susceptible to the overjustification effect when they do not seem to be able to reason in terms of the attributional logic supposedly mediating the effect? Though there are a number of mediators that could play a role in the overjustification effect (see Footnote l), the same discounting logic documented in young children in the entity-focus condition might underlie their behavioral responses to external pressure to engage in interesting activities. In fact, the choice entity-focus subjects were asked to make is more similar to the one they must make in the typical overjustification experiment (e.g., Lepper et al., 1973). This proposed resolution of the paradox is perhaps a bit ironic, as our emphasis on changes in activity/object evaluation following the imposition of social constraints echoes back to the insufficient justification studies of a number of years back (e.g., Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963). In those “forbidden toy” experiments, children prohibited from playing with certain toys when only mildly threatened with negative consequences for doing so developed negative attitudes towards those toys, presumably to resolve the dissonance between their behavior and their attraction to the toys. Lepper (1973) reconceptualized this work in terms of self-perception processes, presenting evidence that the behavior of children in this experimental paradigm was due not only to derogation of the forbidden toys but also to changes in their self-image (i.e., “I’m a good boy/girl, I listen to adults”). And as Lepper (1981) recounts, it was this work that led to the classic Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973) study, as the attributional frame of reference they were developing encouraged him and his colleagues to expand their research on how social controls on behavior affect self-perception. The current experiment suggests that for young children, at least, the focus in the insufficient justification literature on evaluations of the object or activity was quite appropriate and also suggests that

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overjustification effects may be similarly mediated. Of course, the nature of the mediation of the phenomenon in older children and adults remains an open question, but the results of Experiment 2 provide tentative evidence that attributions focused on characteristics of the self as opposed to those about the activity are involved. Older subjects were more likely to use the discounting principle when presented with person-focus questions. Our resolution of the paradox should be compared to that of Lepper et al. (1982). Abstract attributional schemata derive from concrete, scripted knowledge, and in Lepper et al.3 words, “the relative sophistication of children’s responses to situations involving extrinsic incentives or other social constraints should depend much more substantially than those of adults or older children on the relationship between those situations and other settings in which the child has previously encountered comparable social control techniques” (p. 53). Their research focused on knowledge of the “if-then” or “means-end” contingency (e.g., “if you eat your vegetables, then you can have some ice cream”), as interviews with children had suggested to them that this contingency embodies a well-known script for children. It was found that even 4-5 year old children showed some tendency to discount intrinsic interest in an activity presented as simply a means to earn the chance to engage in another activity (see also Aloise & Miller 1991). Based in part on this research, Kassin and Lepper (1984) proposed a social-developmental model of the development of attribution processes (see also Kassin & Pryor, 1985; Kassin & Ellis, 1988). According to the model, young children’s use of any attributional principle such as discounting will be highly dependent on the relationship between the setting they are in and other situations they have experienced where the principle applies. Older children have a wider range of experiences and the ability to think in more abstract terms and so will be able to generate abstract attributional schemata such as the MSC schema. They will therefore be able to apply attributional principles to novel situations. The finding in Experiment 2 that subjects were more likely to discount when the story protagonists were children of their own sex is consistent with Kassin and Lepper’s model, as it goes without saying that stories involving same-sex children will be more similar to settings in which subjects have previously encountered social control techniques than stories involving opposite-sex children. Similarly, Newman and Ruble (1988) found evidence that 5-to 6-year-olds will use the discounting principle when asked to reason about a situation where pressure in the form of a command was exerted to encourage children to play with each othera situation arguably more familiar to them than one where pressure is applied to play with toys. Our findings are indeed quite compatible with Kassin and Lepper’s (1984) social-developmental model. One might argue that the sequence

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of events portrayed by the entity-focus story pairs is a more familiar one to young children than the events described in the person-focus condition (see Table 1). Also in keeping with the model, with increasing age subjects were more flexible overall in their application of the discounting principle; while first graders did not discount in the person-focus condition, second and third graders discounted at levels significantly greater than chance (or marginally so) in both conditions. But this model would not predict the finding that older subjects were more likely to use the discounting principle when presented with person-focus than entity-focus questions in Experiment 2 (and to a lesser extent, in Experiment 1). Data presented by Ruble et al. (1979) and Higgins and Bryant (1982) suggest that these subjects were at a point where they were already biased toward explaining sentiment-related behavior in terms of person factors. This bias seems to have made it easier for them to reason about situations emphasizing variability across persons. The overall pattern of the results is more parsimoniously explained in terms of the operation of attributional biases reflecting knowledge and beliefs about the causes of behavior, rather than in terms of age-related differences in familiarity with social situations. The results of the present experiments are also important in that they demonstrate that young children may be able to use the discounting principle even when the testing procedure more closely mirrors those of previous studies and when the social situations they are presented with do not necessarily embody social scripts as familiar as the “if-then” contingency. And again, the vignettes used here mirror more closely the typical overjustification manipulations that have been shown to undermine young children’s intrinsic motivation. One last issue that needs to be addressed is how these results can be generalized to reward situations (the more typical overjustification manipulation) when young children’s discounting in the entity-focus condition was only demonstrated for vignettes involving commands. As Karniol and Ross (1979) have demonstrated, the manipulative intent behind offers of rewards has to be more salient than it is in the typical quickly sketched discounting vignette before young children will consistently perceive them as extrinsic causes of behavior. One might assume that in actual social interaction, such manipulative intent would be more transparent. Subjects’ actual experience with offers of reward should also affect how they interpret such behavior. In fact, Kassin and Ellis (1988) demonstrated that children were more likely to use the discounting principle when a target actor was offered a reward if they had themselves been previously bribed in the laboratory. And Newman and Ruble (1988) found that 5-to 6-yearold subjects who were themselves not very intrinsically motivated to interact with peers were more likely to discount the intrinsic motivation of two children to play together when one of the children had been offered a piece of cake as a bribe to do so. Other data indicated that these low-

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motivation subjects may have more often experienced pressure to engage in activities with other children; their parents were more likely than the parents of other subjects to report that they played a very active role in the formation of their children’s friendships. Low-motivation subjects were thus more likely to recognize the manipulative intent behind the offer of a reward. In sum, the kinds of social judgments we make are dependent not only on our logical abilities, but on content-specific social knowledge. This general rule is particularly important to remember when assessing young children’s attributional abilities and schemata. Much previous research indicates that young children have difficulty applying a discounting rule to judgments about behavior. When experimental materials are designed so as to take into account young children’s general assumptions about the causes of behavior-in particular, their knowledge and beliefs about person and entity causes-the paradoxical inconsistency between young children’s behavior in response to external constraints and judgments involving those constraints disappears. Even 6-year-olds may understand and use an MSC schema, but the causal constructs to which it will be applied will vary with developmental level. REFERENCES Aloise, P. A., 8~ Miller, P. H. (1991). Discounting in preschoolers: Effect of type of reward agent. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 52, 70-86. Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1963). Effect of the severity of threat on the devaluation of forbidden behavior. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66, X34-588. Boggiano, A. K., & Hertel, P. T. (1983). Bonuses and bribes: Mood effects in memory. Social Cognition, 2, 49-61. Butzin, C. A., & Dozier, M. (1986). Children’s use of ulterior motive information. Child Development, 57, 1375-1385. Cohen, E. A., Gelfand, D. M., & Hartmann, D. P. (1981). Causal reasoning as a function of behavioral consequences. Child Development, 52, 514-522. Costanzo, P. R., & Dix, T. H. (1983). Beyond the information processed: Socialization in the development of attributional processes. In E. T. Higgins, D. N. Ruble, & W. W. Hartup (Eds.), Social cognition and social development: A sociocultural perspective (pp. 63-81). New York: Cambridge. Dalenberg, C. J., Bierman, K. L., & Furman, W. (1984). A reexamination of developmental changes in causal attributions. Developmental Psychology, u), 575-583. Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 105-115. Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1980). The empirical exploration of intrinsic motivational process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 13, pp. 39-80). New York: Academic Press. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: 3. Speech acts (pp. 41-58). New York: Academic Press. Grumet, J. F. (1974). Effects of adult and peer sanctions on children’s attributions of preference. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Duke University, Durham, NC. Hazlewood, J. D., & Olson, J. M. (1986). Covariation information, causal questioning, and interpersonal behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 276-291.

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