Examined persuasive appeals and responses to appeals among kindergarten, second-, and fourth-grade friends and acquaintances. Also evaluated social perspective-taking, friendship, and self-interest reasoning as predictors of appeals and responses. Children, paired with a friend or an acquaintance, participated in a task designed to examine sharing…

This study examines the ability of students to develop empathy for peoples of the past and to avoid the belief that people in the past were no different than today. The paper reports the results of a year-long qualitative investigation of fourth and fifth graders' attempts to understand the values, attitudes, and beliefs of people in the past. The…

Examines kindergarten, second-, and fourth-grade children's use of the presence or absence of extrinsic rewards to make inferences about the intrinsic motivation of another person. Results are discussed in terms of parameters of the attributional effects, the possible mechanism responsible for the phenomena, and significance for other…

This study examined the interactive role of empathic disposition and affective perspective-taking ability (APT) in children's machiavellianism, prosocial behavior, and motive for helping. Children demonstrating low empathy and high APT were expected to be highly machiavellian and to cite self-oriented reasons for helping more frequently than would…