Person perception accuracy in aggressive, withdrawn, and normal 10 and 14 year-old boys

Methodological and conceptual advances in adult person perception studies have assisted researchers in clarifying adult impression formation and person perception accuracy. In this study, these methodological and conceptual advances were utilized to help understand impression formation and accuracy issues in children and adolescents. Specifically, models of dispositional judgments (act frequency, attribution, and conditional) were tested in order to better understand children's and adolescents' judgment processes, to clarify earlier developmental findings in the person perception literature, and to assess the relation between children's and adolescents' person perception accuracy with recent adult novices and experts. Of particular interest was the relationship between accuracy and the subjects' psychopathological categorization (aggressive, withdrawn, and normal). Sixty-six children and adolescents were used in a $2 \times 3 \times 2$ mixed factorial design. Dispositional category of subject group (normal, aggressive, and withdrawn) and age of subject (children and adolescents) varied between subjects, and type of target (intact and inverse) was a within subjects factor. Children and adolescents viewed a videotape which consisted of several scenes and were asked to observe the behavior of two target children. Although the target children displayed the same "acts," their acts occurred in response to different social situations. The "intact" target responded to a range of social situations the way actual aggressive children tend to respond. The "inverse" target displayed the same frequency of behavior, but the pattern of responses across situations was disrupted. In situations in which aggressive children tend to be most aggressive, the inverse target was least aggressive. In situations in which aggressive children tend to be least aggressive, the inverse target was most aggressive. The findings from this research support the hypothesis that children and adolescents use contextual information in their judgments and are sensitive to the organization of behavior. Children and adolescents judged the targets to be different and were able to recall more accurately the pattern of behavior for the ecologically representative (intact) target than for the inverse target. Whereas aggressive subjects were not able to detect aggression more readily or recover the pattern of behavior for aggression more accurately for the intact target, aggressive subjects, as expected, had the most difficulty recovering the pattern of behavior for the inverse target. The pattern of errors and resulting differences in judgment suggest that aggressive adolescents may have specialized information concerning aggressive behavior, but that this prior information may interfere or limit their judgment processes. Given that none of the three models of dispositional judgments advanced can fully account for the findings an alternative model is presented.