JOURNAL OF APPHED DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 12t 237-253 (1991)
The Effect of Causal Information on Peer Perceptions of Children With Physical Problems CAROL K. SIGELMAN University of Arizona
To test attributional hypotheses about the relationship between perceptions that a problem is uncontrollable and positive afiCectiveresponses to the problem's bearer, children in kindergarten/first grade and fourth/fifth grade heard descriptions of obese and wheelchair-bound gids and leamed that the cause of each condition was either uncontrollable (diseasevs. birth defect vs. parental malfeasance) or unknown. The provision of low-responsibility information reduced the tendency, even in young children, to hold victims responsible for having problems and for correcting them. However, it did not alter their liking for the target children because affective response was more a function of the nature of a problem than its perceived cause.
As early as the preschool years, children tend to express negative attitudes toward peers who are physically different. For example, they hold negative stereotypes of overweight peers (e.g., see DeJong & Kleck, 1986; Jarvie, Lahey, Graziano, & Framer, 1983), and, although they express greater social acceptance of physically disabled peers than of obese ones, they nonetheless view wheelchair-bound peers as less likeable than able-bodied peers (e.g., Richardson, 1970; Sigelman, Miller, & Whitworth, 1986). Children's responses to individuals who are physically different are, in all likelihood, the product of many factors, including their levels of social-cognitive development, their direct experiences with physically different individuals, and their exposure to information about how parents, peers, and other key socialization agents view and treat such individuals. Through their social learning experiences, children acquire feelings toward individuals with physical problems, beliefs about their characteristics, and naive theories of the causes of their problems. If, as is highly probable in our society, children hear other people express disgust at the physical appearance of overweight people and fault them for not controlling their diets, they may come to Portionsof this articlewerepresentedat the biennialmeetingof the Societyfor Researchin Child Development,April, 1989, KansasCity, MO. Thanksare extendedto Joseph'Shorokeyand the staff and students of Model LaboratorySchool. Correspondenceand requests for reprints should be sent to Carol K. Sigelman, Departmentof Psychology,Universityof Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. 237
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view overeating as the cause of obesity and blame overweight people for their condition, whereas if they hear others react sympathetically to overweight or physically disabled people, they may conclude that such individuals cannot help being the way they are. Although children can acquire negative feelings about physically different individuals in a variety of ways, there is reason to believe that the information they receive about the causes of various physical conditions may have important effects on their affective responses. This study asks how children normally perceive the causes of obesity and physical disability, and whether social acceptance of peers with these conditions could be enhanced if children were led to believe that such peers bore no personal responsibility for their physical problems. Weiner's (1986; Weiner & Graham, 1984) attribution theory suggests that affective responses to other people should be more positive when the cause of their problems or failings is uncontrollable than when it is controllable. Uncontrollable problems, such as failure due to lack of ability, are likely to elicit pity and sympathy, whereas controllable problems, such as failure due to lack of effort, are likely to arouse anger. Indeed, adolescents and adults typically react more positively to people whose physical or psychological problems are perceived as uncontrollable in origin than to people whose problems are seen as their own doing (Jones et al., 1984; Weiner, Perry, & Magnusson, 1988). Moreover, adolescents and adults respond even to very brief messages about the controllability or uncontrollability of problems in the manner predicted by attribution theory. DeJong (1980), for example, found that adolescents stigmatized an overweight girl less when told that she had a thyroid disorder than when offered no information about the cause of her obesity, and Weiner et al. (1988) demonstrated that affective responses to individuals with several different physical and behavioral problems were more positive when the conditions were described as uncontrollable. If children respond as adults do to causal information about physical conditions, there would be merit in including, as one component of interventions designed to increase acceptance of peers with physical problems, information indicating that many such problems are uncontrollable. But do young children have the cognitive competence to respond to causal information as adults do? That is, can they grasp information indicating that a peer's problem is not his or her fault, and do they then base their evaluative reactions to individuals with problems on their analyses of a problem's causality? In judging the wrongness of transgressions, preschool children appear to be capable of considering whether an actor's intentions were good or bad, but they are nonetheless likely to weight the consequences of actions (i.e., the degree of damage or harm done) more heavily and the intentions behind the actions less heavily than older children do (e.g., Buldain, Crano, & Wegner, 1982; Surber, 1977). Similarly, Weiner and his colleagues, while uncovering some evidence that young children are capable causal analysts, also found that relationships between causal attributions and emotional reactions, such as anger and pity, tend to be
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stronger among older children (see Graham, Doubleday, & Guarino, 1984; Weiner & Graham, 1984). For example, although young children appear to understand that a teacher's anger at a student implies a controllable lack of effort on the student's part, it is not until middle childhood that the link between a teacher's pity and an uncontrollable lack of ability is grasped (Weiner, Graham, Stern, & Lawson, 1982). It might be predicted, then, that the link between causal attributions and affective responses to peers with physical problems should be more evident among older than younger children. So far, however, research directly examining children's perceptions of peers with physical and psychological disorders has provided only equivocal support for the hypothesis that understandings of problem causality shape affective responses. For example, Sigelman and Begley (1987) provided 5- to 6- and 9- to 10-year-olds with high-responsibility explanations, low-responsibility explanations, or no explanations of peers' physical and behavioral problems. Even young children blamed target children less and liked them more as their personal responsibility for their problems decreased. However, information implying high responsibility for problems had more impact than information implying low responsibility; indeed, only in the case of a highly stigmatized aggressive child did providing a low-responsibility explanation (a bump on the head that caused brain damage) increase liking beyond the level evident when no causal information was offered. Moreover, the extent to which both younger and older children liked target children appeared to be more strongly influenced by a problem's symptomology than by its perceived cause. Even more discouraging are the findings of Potter and Roberts (1984), who reported that explaining diabetes and epilepsy to elementary school children rendered peers with these disorders somewhat less socially attractive than when the disorders were simply described. Thus, one must take seriously the possibility that informing children that a peer's problem is the uncontrollable result of a disease or birth defect may do nothing to increase, and may even jeopardize, social acceptance. Children, particularly young children, have difficulty comprehending the concept of disease (Bibace & Walsh, 1980; Burbach & Peterson, 1986; Kister & Patterson, 1980; Pert'in & Gerrity, 1981), probably because disease processes are internal and not directly observable. Indeed, some young children believe that noncontagious illnesses are contagious and that illnesses are punishments for misbehavior (Kister & Patterson, 1980; Siegal, 1988). If such beliefs are widespread, explaining to children that physical problems are due to disease might do more to increase stigma than to reduce personal blame. Finally, emphasizing that problems have internal and uncontrollable causes, which might absolve the individual from blame if he or she fails to improve, may also undermine expectations that improvement is possible. Indeed, adults who subscribe to a disease model rather than a social learning model of mental illness are likely to believe that the individual can do little to control the future course of his or her disorder (Fisher & Farina, 1979). However, it is possible that the effects of informing children that a problem
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has an uncontrollable cause depends on whether that cause is internal or external. Young children, in particular, might be more responsive to low-responsibility explanations centering on tangible, external causes, such as parental malfeasance, than to explanations centering on less tangible and comprehensible internal causes, such as diseases or birth defects. In the Sigelman and Begley (1987) study, the only low-responsibility explanations of disability, obesity, and learning disability offered to children pointed to disease as the cause, and they failed to increase liking for victims. The bump-on-the-head explanation of aggression was more effective, perhaps because it was more visualizable. This study was designed to test further the hypothesis, derived from Weiner's attribution theory, that informing children that a peer bears no personal responsibility for a physical problem will alter their spontaneous causal attributions, lead them to assign less blame to the victim, and, in turn, foster more sympathetic affective responses. It was predicted that older children would be more responsive than young children to such causal information, and that young children would be more responsive to explanations emphasizing external and uncontrollable causes (parental actions) than to explanations citing internal and uncontrollable causes (diseases and birth defects).
METHOD Participants The 99 participants were randomly selected from classes at a university laboratory school. The school serves students from predominantly white, middle-class, college-educated families, drawing approximately one-third of its students from faculty/staff homes. It houses a self-contained unit for severely disabled children, affording nondisabled students an opportunity to occasionally encounter, though not to interact routinely with, physically different children. There were 51 children in kindergarten or first grade (mean age = 6.2) and 48 in fourth or fifth grade (mean age = 9.9), 50 boys and 49 girls in all. At each grade level, 6 boys and 6 girls were exposed to each of the four experimental treatments in the study. (Due to administrative errors involving the young children, there were two extra boys in one cell and an extra girl in another.) Parents had given the school written consent in advance for participation in projects approved by the school's ethical review committee; children provided their own verbal consent.
Stimulus Descriptions and Manipulations Children were told that they would be hearing a teacher in a nearby city describe some of her students "just your age." In a tape-recorded message, a middle-aged woman concretely, matter-of-factly, and redundantly described each of two girls, one with severe obesity, the other wheelchair-bound. Both descriptions began with background information (hair color, eye color, and parents' places of employment). Wendy, the obese girl, was described as very fat, with tight-fitting
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clothes, puffy cheeks and flabby arms and legs, and a jiggle in her stomach when she moved. It was communicated that other children could not lift her and that she had some difficulty getting in and out of her desk at school. Jodi, the wheelchair-bound gift, was described as someone who was restricted to her wheelchair, could not walk or stand without holding onto something, and could not join the other children in play at recess. After one of the problem descriptions was presented and children provided initial evaluations of the target child, they heard a second taped message from the teacher describing what she had learned when she attempted to find out why the target child had her problem. Four different causal messages were constructed for each problem: disease, birth defect, parental malfeasance, and cause unknown. The first two low-responsibility explanations thus cited internal and uncontrollable causes, whereas the third pointed to an external and uncontrollable cause. To illustrate, the disease message for the disabled gift read as follows: We've been in school for a few months now. Jodi couldn't walk at the start of the school year, and she still can't walk now. But I c a n tell you something now about why she can't walk. It's because of a disease. Lots of different kinds of diseases can make a baby sick, and Jodi got one kind of disease. When Jodi was very little, she got a disease that made her very sick, and the disease made it so her body wouldn't work right anymore. This disease hurt parts way inside, like the muscles and the nerves, that let us move our legs. Her body just doesn't make the muscles in her legs move because the disease made her sick. She would want to walk, and her brain would try to tell her legs to move, but no matter what, her legs can't move at all. That's the way it is--the disease made her body sick, and so she got so she can't walk. The parallel birth-defect message communicated that Jodi was born with this same bodily dysfunction, whereas the parental malfeasance message described how her father negligently ran over her in his car while she was playing in the driveway. The fourth message, a no-cause message, described only the teacher's failure to make contact with Jodi's parents to find out why Jodi couldn't walk. All four messages began identically, and all three low-responsibility messages ended with the same emphasis on her inability to walk despite every effort to do so. Four similar causal messages were constructed about the obese gift, whose weight problem was said to be caused either by: (1) a disease contracted early in life that caused malfunctioning of the stomach and glands, so that even eating just enough food to stay alive resulted in weight gain; (2) a birth defect with the same physiological effects; (3) parental malfeasance in the form of a mother who got angry if Wendy did not eat the large amounts o f food thrust upon her; and (4) an unknown cause. Each participant heard about both the disabled and obese girls but was randomly assigned to one o f the four causal information conditions (disease, birth defect, parental malfeasance, and no cause). Thus, a child in the disease condition heard disease scenarios for both target children.
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Dependent Measures Participants responded to questions designed to measure their affective response to a target child, understanding of the causal information provided (or spontaneous causal analysis), perception of blame for the problem, and perception of the future controllability of the problem. Most questions called for responses on a 1 to 6 scale with the options not at all, a little, some, quite a bit, a lot, and a whole lot. These options were so displayed on a large poster board with six bars of increasing heights. The rating procedure was explained and pretested with simple examples (e.g., degree of liking for ice cream or for falling down) until the child demonstrated understanding of the scale. Affective response to the target child was tapped through four questions: "How nice is (child)? "How bad is (child)?" How much do you like (child)?" and "How much do you want to be (child's) friend?" The resulting 1 to 6 scores for these items were averaged (following reverse scoring of the bad item) to form a total affective response score that could range from 1 to 6. For the obese and disabled targets, respectively, Cronbach's alphas were .65 and .66 for kindergarten/first grade and .80 and .77 for fourth/fifth grade, suggesting that the scale's moderate internal consistency increased somewhat with age. Children were also asked, after hearing about both girls, which one they liked better. In order to assess understanding of causality, children were first asked, "Did the teacher tell you why (Wendy is fat/Jodi can't walk), or didn't she know why?" If they said the teacher gave a reason, they were asked what the teacher said; if not, they were asked, "Why do you think (Wendy is fat/Jodi can't walk?)" Finally, as a check on the plausibility of the explanations provided, children provided a rating from not at all to a whole lot in response to the question, "How much do you believe that's the real reason why?" Causes cited by children were coded into the following categories: born that way, disease, parent's fault, accident, fall, eats too much (or the wrong things), bodily dysfunction (with underlying origin unclear), or don't know/reiteration of the problem. Answers given by children in the three responsibility conditions were also coded either as inadequate, partially adequate, or fully adequate renderings of the taped information. Two independent coders readily agreed both on type of explanation offered (K = .94) and adequacy of rendering of the supplied reason (K = .83); disagreements were resolved before final codes were assigned. The remaining questions, all using the 1 to 6 response scale, measured blame assigned to the target child ("How much is Wendy/Jodi to blame for being fat/for not being able to walk?"); blame assigned to other factors ("How much is something else to blame that Wendy is fat/Jodi can't walk?"); personal controllability of the problem's future course ("How much could Wendy do to get skinny/Jodi do to start walking if she really tried?"); and controllability of the problem by others ("How much could somebody else, like a doctor, do to make Wendy skinny/Jodi walk if they really tried?"). The last two questions were included to assess the possibility that emphasizing the uncontrollability of a
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problem's cause engenders a belief that the problem's solution is also uncontrollable by the individual (see Brickman et al., 1982). Procedure and Analysis Each child was interviewed individually in a guidance office by a male experimenter blind to the specific hypotheses. The order of presentation of the two target children was randomly determined for each participant. Children answered the four affective response questions after hearing the problem described and again immediately after receiving the causal information. They then answered the causality, blame, and future controllability questions in the order previously described. Each rating measure was subjected to a 2 x 4 x 2 analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the following variables: Problem (obese vs. disabled, a repeatedmeasures variable) x Causal Information (disease, birth defect, parental malfeasance, no cause) x Grade Level (K/1st vs. 4th/Sth). Follow-up analyses consisted of F tests for simple effects and Newman-Keuls tests for differences between means; differences significant at the .05 level are discussed in the following.
RESULTS Causal Understanding Even young children clearly comprehended the causal information provided to them. In response to low-responsibility explanations of obesity, 92.1% of the younger and 88.9% of the older children in the three causal information conditions gave answers to the why question that fully matched the information they had been given. Corresponding percentages for the physical disability were 94.7% and 88.9%. There were no indications that one low-responsibility explanation was more difficult to understand than another. The spontaneous explanations offered by children who were not presented with any causal information are of special interest. In explaining obesity, the vast majority of younger children (84.6%) cited eating too much. Reference to this internal and controllable cause decreased nonsignificantly with age to 50.0% among fourth and fifth graders, X2(1, N = 25) = 2.03. Otherwise, older children suggested that the child might have been born that way (25.0%) or that her parents might have been to blame (16.7%). Spontaneous explanations of physical disability were widely varied at both ages and included being born that way, having a disease, or having suffered a fall or accident. However, the modal response at both ages (30.8% of the young and 41.7% of the older children) was to describe physical dysfunction without making its underlying cause clear (e.g., "she's crippled"). Finally, children's confidence in the explanations they gave was generally high and did not vary as a function of age of subject or target child's problem, although it was affected by causal information condition, F(3, 91) = 7.89, p <
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.0001. Not surprisingly, children who were given no causal information were less confident of their theories than children who received any of the three lowresponsibility explanations were (M = 3.91 for no cause vs. 5.18 for birth defect, 5.12 for disease, and 4.75 for parental malfeasance). Overall, then, both younger and older children grasped the simple explanations they had been given and had confidence in their validity. Perceived Blame for Problems Does providing children with low-responsibility causal information affect the extent to which they blame target children for having problems? Table l shows the mean ratings, as a function of problem, cause, and grade level of perceiver, of both the extent to which the child is to blame and the extent to which "something else" is to blame for the problem. The ANOVA for blame assigned to the child revealed effects of causal condition, F(3, 91) = 6.82, p < .0001; grade, F(1, 91) = 7.06, p < .01; and problem F(1, 91) = 5.43, p < .05. Overall, children given no causal information blamed target children more than did the children who were given low-responsibility information (2.52 vs. 1.38 for birth defect, 1.60 for disease, and 1.46 for parental malfeasance). In addition, younger children were generally more likely to blame victims than older children were (2.01 vs. 1.46), and the obese child was blamed more than the disabled child (1.90 vs. 1.59). Although the three-way interaction fell short of significance (p < .07), trends in the data suggested that young children were
TABLE 1 Means end Standard Deviations of Ratings of Child Blame end Other Blame as • Function of Problem, Cause, and Grade Level
Problem/Grade
Disease M (SD)
Causal Condition Birth Dwfec-t Parent M (SD) M (SD)
No Cause M (SD)
Blame Assigned to Child Obese K/lst 4th/5th Wheelchair K/lst 4th/Sth
2.36 1.25
(1.86) (.62)
1.75 1.17
(1.54) (,56)
1.83 1.08
(1.27) (.88)
2.69 2.92
(1.93) (1.68)
1.57 1.98
(.85) (.29)
1.50 1.08
(1.16) (.88)
1.56 1.33
(1.16) (.65)
2.69 1.75
(1.70) (.87)
Blame Assigned to "Something Else" Obese K/lst 4th/5th Wheelchair K/lst 4th//5th
2.71 4.08
(1.90) (2.02)
2.25 3.75
(1.54) (1.60)
4.17 3.92
(1.40) (1.98)
2.62 3.83
(1.45) (1.19)
2.57 4.08
(2.03) (2.15)
2.67 3.42
(1.87) (1.56)
3.83 4.83
(1.34) (1.54)
3.15 3.33
(1.72) (1,50)
Note. Maximum score for each measure is 6.
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more affected by low-responsibility explanations of disability and less affected by low-responsibility explanations of obesity than older children were. Ratings of the extent to which something else besides the child herself were to blame were also influenced by the explanations provided. Here, the main effect of causal information fell just short of significance (p < .06); but a grade effect was again evident, F(1, 91) = 8.63, p < .01; and the three-way interaction attained significance, F(3, 91) = 2.92, p < .05. In response to the obese child, young children blamed other factors more when parental malfeasance was the stated cause than in any other causal condition. Similarly, young children blamed disability on external factors more in the parental malfeasance condition than in either the birth defect or disease conditions. In other words, young children's attention was directed toward causes outside the person primarily when an external and uncontrollable cause was explicitly cited. By comparison, older children generally assigned more blame to factors outside the victim than younger children did. Their tendency to blame factors outside the child for obesity was unaffected by causal information; in response to the disabled child, they blamed other factors more when the cause was parental malfeasance than when it was either a birth defect or unknown. As a result, older children blamed other factors significantly more than younger children did, except when parental malfeasance was offered as the cause either of obesity or disability, and when disease was the stated reason for disability. Combined with judgments of the blameworthiness of the target children, these ratings suggest that all three types of low-responsibility causal information reduced the degree of blame assigned to the victim, but that the parental malfeasance explanation was more effective than the others at calling attention to external contributors to physical problems. Moreover, even young children were responsive to the explanations they were given. They held a child, especially a disabled one, less accountable for her problem if they were explicitly told that the cause was uncontrollable than if they were left to their own devices to explain it, and they assigned blame to external factors when they were told that a child's parent had caused the problem.
Prospects for Solving Problems To the extent that peers believe children could solve their physical problems if they really tried, children with problems might be stigmatized if they fail to improve. Providing information suggesting that problems are uncontrollable in origin might be expected to weaken the belief that recovery is controllable by the individual. Table 2 (p. 246) displays the mean ratings of how much the child or someone else could do to remedy problems. Ratings of how much a child could improve with effort were influenced by causal information, F(3, 91) = 7.44, p < .0001; the interaction of causal condition and grade, F(3, 91) = 7.15, p < .0001; and the interaction of causal condition and problem, F(3, 91) = .001. That is, the effect of causal information varied depending on the age of the perceivers and the target child being judged.
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TABLE 2 Means and Standard Deviations of Ratings of Child's and Others' Capacities to Solve Problem as a Function of Problem, Cause, and Grade Level
Problem/Grade
Disease M (SD)
Causal Condition Birth Defect Parent M (SD) M (SD)
No Cause M (SD)
Capacity of Child to Change Obese K/lst 4th/5th Wheelchair K/lst 4th/5th
3.00 2.08
(1.52) (1.38)
4.58 3.25
(1.88) (1.82)
3.83 5.42
(1.95) (1.00
4.85 5.17
(1.28) (.83)
3.57 3.50
(1,74) (1.68)
4.67 2.50
(1.92) (1.09)
2.50 4.17
(1.98) (1.90)
4.69 4.17
(1.84) (1.34)
Capacity of Others to Change Child
Obese K/lst 4th/5th Wheelchair K/lst 4th//Sth
4.21 3.33
(1.42) (1.30)
4.75 4.00
(1.54) (1.21)
3.92 5,00
(1.73) (1.13)
4.62 5.17
(1.50) (.83)
4.14 3.83
(1,51) (1.11)
5.67 3.58
(.65) (1.38)
4.00 4.58
(1.28) (1.62)
4,77 4.58
(1.42) (1.24)
Note. Maximum score for each measure is 6.
Overall, belief that the obese girl could become skinny if she exerted effort was greater when the cause was a birth defect (3.92), parental malfeasance (4.63), or unknown (5.00) than when it was a disease (2.58). Confidence that the disabled girl could improve through effort was high when no causal information was provided (4.44), but decreased significantly when low-responsibility explanations were provided (3.58 for birth defect, 3.54 for disease, and 3.33 for parental error). However, older and younger children saw things differently. Young children were less optimistic about self-initiated change when the cause of problems was parental malfeasance (3.16) or disease (3.28) than when it was either unknown (4.77) or a birth defect (4.62). Apparently, they did not appreciate that it might be difficult to undo the effects of a birth defect. By contrast, older children viewed problems caused either by disease or birth defects (means of 2.79 and 2.88, respectively) as less remediable by the individual than problems of unknown cause (4.67) and problems due to parental error (4.80). As a result, older children were more pessimistic than younger children about the capacity of children with birth defects to change (2.88 vs. 4.62), but they were more optimistic than younger children about the self-change capacities of children whose problems were due to parental malfeasance (4.80 vs. 3.16). Confidence that "someone else, like a doctor" could solve these problems was also a function of causal information, F(3, 91) = 2.75, p < .05, and the interaction of cause and grade, F(3, 91) = 4.32, p < .01. Young children had
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abundant faith that adults could "fix" problems, regardless of their causality (4.70 for no cause; 5.21 for birth defects; 4.18 for disease; and 3.96 fo(parental malfeasance, n.s.). Older children were significantly more optimistic when told nothing about the cause of problems (4.88) than when told the cause was a disease (3.58; mean ratings for birth defects and parental malfeasance were intermediate, 3.79 and 4.79, respectively). As a result, older children proved to be significantly less optimistic about changing problems due to birth defects than young children were. Affective Reactions to Problem Children Although exculpatory causal information appears to reduce the degree to which children blame obese and disabled peers for their conditions, does it also make children like these peers more? Is there, as Weiner predicted, a relationship between causal attributions and affective response? Because evaluative responses to the target children were measured before and after causal information was presented, scores on the four-item affective response scale were analyzed by time of assessment (pre or post), problem, causal condition, and grade. The significant effects in this analysis were type of problem, F(1, 91) = 90.22, p < .0001; time of assessment, F(I, 91) = 21.80, p < .0001; and Type of Problem x Time of Assessment, F(1, 91) = 11.14, p < .001. Means and standard deviations of liking scores before and after the causal information had been presented are displayed in Table 3. TABLE 3 Means and Standard Deviations of Affective Responses as a Function of Problem, Cause, and Grade Level
Problem/Grade
Disease M (SD)
Causal Condition Birth Defect Parent
M
(SD)
M
(SD)
No Cause
M
(SD)
Liking before Causal Information was Presented Obese K/lst 4th/5th Wheelchair K/lst 4th/5th
3.86 4.52
(1.13) (.75)
4.41 4.02
(1.34) (1.08)
4.31 4.19
(1.23) (.64)
4.02 4.60
(.77) (.91)
5.23 5.06
(.88) (.48)
5.31 5.12
(.83) (,73)
4.83 5.06
(.85) (.86)
4.73 5.06
(1.12) (.76)
Liking after Causal Information was Presented Obese K/lst 4th/Sth Wheelchair K/lst 4th//Sth
4.38 4.90
(1.16) (.63)
4.63 4.58
(1.26) (.83)
4.58 4.54
(1.04) (.92)
4.38 4.79
(.88) (.82)
5.11 5.33
(.77) (.51)
5.06 5.15
(1.03) (.73)
4.98 5.31
(.93) (.75)
4.88 4.94
(1.10) (1.03)
Note. Maximum score for each measure is 6.
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Children who were offered low-responsibility explanations for p r o b l e m s liked target children no more or less than children given no causal information.1 Instead, across causal information conditions and at both age levels, the disabled girl was liked more than the overweight girl. This difference in affective response due to the nature of the problem was evident before any causal messages were provided (5.05 for disabled vs. 4.23 for obese overall), and it was still evident afterwards (5.09 vs. 4.59). The significant interaction between type of problem and time of assessment was attributable to a general increase from pretest to posttest in liking for the overweight girl, regardless o f causal condition. Although mean ratings of both girls were above the neutral point, preference for the disabled girl over the obese girl was strongly corroborated when children were forced at the end o f the interview to choose which girl they liked more: 78.4% of the young children and 91.7% o f the older children chose the disabled girl (a nonsignificant age difference). 2 DISCUSSION It is clear that even 5- to 6-year-old children can grasp simple explanations o f obesity and physical disability that attribute these problems to uncontrollable causes: diseases, birth defects, and the harmful actions of parents. The more significant question is whether such explanations have the beneficial effects o f deflecting blame from children with problems and rendering them more socially acceptable to their peers, as predicted by Weiner's attribution theory. Although the findings here suggest that young children may not have grasped the implications o f low-responsibility explanations quite as well as older children, the hypothesized link between causal attributions and affective responses failed to materialize even among the older children. It is instructive to compare the perceptions o f kindergarteners/first graders and fourth/fifth graders. For the most part, the two age groups responded similarly. Thus, young children, like older children, blamed target individuals less when tSupplementary analyses indicated that there were also no significant correlations between blame of the target child and affective response to the child, in either age group, or in any causal condition. 2Although sex differences were not of explicit interest in this study and target children were always gifts, the ANOVAsreported were rerun with sex of subject included as a factor to determine whether findings generalized across the sexes. The ANOVAfor affective response indicated that girls liked the target girls, especially the obese girl, significantly more than boys did. Postmanipulation liking for the obese gift averaged 4.24 for boys and 4.95 for girls; for the disabled girl, means were 4.88 for boys and 5.32 for gifts. Sex of subject did not interact with causal condition, however. In the analysis of blame-of-child ratings, sex of subject did interact with causal condition, grade, and causal condition by grade. Although boys and gifts assigned similar degrees of blame to the disabled girl, young girls were more likely than young boys or older children to blame the obese girl for being overweight, especially when they were given no causal information. Finally, sex of subject had no main or interactive effects on blame of others or perceived prospects of change by self or others.
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they heard any of the three low-responsibility explanations than when they were left to their own devices to explain physical conditions. If there was any sign of an age difference here, it was that young children tended to be somewhat more strongly affected by explanations of physical disability than by explanations of obesity, perhaps because they so commonly believe that obesity is due to controllable overeating, and that older children tended to be more responsive to lowresponsibility explanations of obesity, perhaps because they already viewed the disabled girl as quite blameless. It was hypothesized that young children might assign less blame to the individual and more blame to factors outside the individual when an uncontrollable cause was external (parental malfeasance) than when it was internal, in view of evidence that internal causes such as diseases are difficult for them to comprehend. Contrary to expectation, the three low-responsibility explanations were equally effective in decreasing the tendency to blame victims. However, calling attention to an external cause did lead young children to attribute more blame to external factors. Consistent with other research (e.g., Maas, Maracek, & Travers, 1978), older children generally blamed the individual less and external or environmental causes more than young children did, although they too placed even more emphasis on external causes when parental malfeasance was the apparent cause of disability. Thus, telling children that problems were due to an external and uncontrollable cause stimulated them to consider multiple causes, including ones outside the individual. Younger and older children also differed in their perceptions of the controllability of a problem's future course. The parental malfeasance and disease explanations reduced young children's confidence that a child could overcome her problem if she really tried. However, young children did not understand that a child with a birth defect might also have difficulty changing through sheer effort, whereas older children did. Moreover, whereas young children were confident that adults could fix any problem, regardless of its cause, older children were relatively pessimistic that adults could reverse the effects of diseases and birth defects. Here, then, are signs that older children have a fuller appreciation that these internal and uncontrollable conditions cannot easily be reversed than young children do. In sum, although young children generally responded appropriately to information about the causes of physical problems, they tended to underestimate external causes of disorders and had difficulty grasping that birth defects pose obstacles to self-improvement and that both diseases and birth defects may limit the ability even of physicians and other powerful adults to cure physical problems. In these areas, older children appeared to have more sophisticated understandings of problem causality and were more sensitive to the implications of the causal information given to them. Despite the fact that children proved responsive to exculpatory explanations in attributing blame and estimating capacity to improve, affective responses to the
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overweight and disabled girls were unaffected by causal information, contrary to hypothesis. Children simply liked the disabled child more than the obese child. This failure of blame-reducing explanations to increase liking is consistent with the previous research on children's perceptions of physical and psychological disorder (Potter & Roberts, 1984; Sigelman & Begley, 1987), and suggests that social acceptance is more a function of the nature of peer's problem than of its causality. It is as if children were thinking, "I understand that you can't help being the way you are, but I'm still not sure I like the way you are or want to associate with you." Why did low-responsibility explanations fall to generate positive affective responses? Possibly such responses would have been evident had measures other than a liking scale been employed (e.g., measures of emotional reactions, such as anger and pity). In addition, affective responses to the target children in this study were fairly positive even before any causal information was presented, suggesting that there may not have been sufficient room for improvement. Blame-reducing explanations of childhood problems may increase social acceptance only when children strongly stigmatize a peer's behavior and clearly blame him or her for it, as was the case for the aggressive target child in Sigelman and Begley's (1987) study. Alternatively, the low-responsibility explanations offered to children in this study may not have been powerful enough to affect social acceptance. Although they were somewhat more elaborate than those presented by Sigelman and Begley (1987) to children, and clearly more elaborate than those Weiner et al. (1988) found to alter the affective responses of adults, it remains possible that children require more elaborate blame-reducing explanations if they are to feel sympathy. Because the study also involved hypothetical, rather than real peers, one cannot rule out the possibility that blame-reducing explanations might prove more effective in increasing social acceptance when children actually know and interact with physically different peers. From a theoretical standpoint, the findings here reinforce accumulating evidence that young children are relatively competent causal analysts, but they fail to conf'trm Weiner's hypothesis that causal attributions for behavior are a major determinant of affective responses. Many factors besides causal attributions presumably influence affective responses to children who are physically different. As demonstrated here, the nature of a child's condition is important; so are the many social learning experiences, unexamined here, that shape each child's cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions to particular physical differences. Coupled with other findings, these hint that cognition-affect relationships observed when children judge peers who succeed or fail at academic tasks may not be as readily observed when children judge peers with physical or psychological problems, and point to the need for research to specify the conditions under which attributions and affect are linked. From an applied standpoint, the findings have several implications. Although one cannot be sure that verbal responses to questions about hypothetical peers
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will predict responses to actual classmates, there is suggestive evidence that children's responses to scales assessing their attitudes toward physically and mentally disabled children correlate with their tendencies to nominate disabled peers as friends and spend time interacting with them (Siperstein, Bak, & O'Keefe, 1988; Voeltz, 1982). Assuming that the findings do generalize, they, like others before them (e.g,, Richardson, 1970; Sigelman et al., 1986), call attention to the problems that overweight children may face in gaining peer acceptance. Although children in our society are explicitly taught that it is socially undesirable to stare at or make fun of physically disabled individuals, or to express anything other than sympathy for them, they receive no such indoctrination regarding overweight people. Instead, they are bombarded by messages saying that it is good to be thin and shameful to be fat and have many opportunities to observe other people stigmatize those who are overweight. Although it is important to teach children about the health benefits of maintaining a normal weight, perhaps it is also time to teach them that many overweight individuals cannot help being overweight and that prejudice toward overweight people is, after all, prejudice. As for teaching children about the causality of physical differences, there may well be merit in helping children to understand that peers with physical problems, especially overweight children, often cannot help being the way they are and cannot be expected to improve through sheer willpower or even the best that medical technology has to offer. At the least, such education may expand children's knowledge of disorders and diseases, reduce their tendency to blame victims for their conditions, and foster more realistic expectations about the prospects for reversing such conditions. Such instruction may prove especially valuable when children incorrectly assume that a peer can control highly stigmatized behavior, such as aggression or hyperactivity (see Sigelman & Begley, 1987). However, our findings also imply that there may be more direct and effective ways to increase social acceptance of children with physical problems than by explaining that these problems are no fault of the child's. Providing nonhandicapped children with opportunities to interact with handicapped children in the context of cooperative learning groups has proven highly successful in this regard (see Johnson, Johnson, & Maruyama, 1983; Madden & Slavin, 1983), and efforts to sensitize parents and teachers to the problem of stigmatization might also help. Fostering sympathetic understanding of the causes of physical conditions is only one of many strategies that might ultimately be required to enhance acceptance of children who are different. REFERENCES
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