Averaging processes in children's judgment of happiness.

Abstract

Summary Children of 6–7 years of age judged happiness of stimulus children on the basis of the nature of their father and mother. In Experiment I(N = 36), it was predicted and found consistent with the averaging rule of stimulus-combination that a pair of polar and mildly polar or neutral parents would contribute less to the happiness of the child than one polar parent (p < .0001). In Experiment II, Ss (N = 40) judged happiness of 25 children of a 5 × 5 design, using father and mother as stimulus factors. According to the differential weight averaging model, the plots of the father (row) factor data across the mother (column) factor should display nonparallelism, and the father by mother interaction should be statistically significant. Though the predicted interaction was significant (p < .01), children appeared to have employed both constant and differential weight averaging rules at the different levels of the same task. Implications of these results were discussed for the weighted average model of information integration.