The way in which children evaluate people's claims about their own psychological characteristics was examined. Among children ages 6-11 from the United States and China (total N = 243), there was an age-related increase in skepticism about self-report concerning the highly value-laden characteristics "honest", "smart", and…

Essentialism is the belief that certain characteristics (of individuals or categories) may be relatively stable, unchanging, likely to be present at birth, and biologically based. The current studies examined how different essentialist beliefs interrelate. For example, does thinking that a property is innate imply that the property cannot be…

Investigated bilingual 6- to 10-year-olds' reasoning about the stability of human psychological characteristics in relation to the obligatory distinction between the Spanish verb forms "ser" and "estar" and the corresponding English form "to be." Found that children treated "ser" and "to be" as…

Four studies with kindergarten through fifth graders and adults examined the development of reasoning about the origins of psychological traits. Results suggested an age-related increase in the tendency to distinguish among different psychological traits, and that over time, individuals come to believe that psychological traits are determined…