Impression updating in 6- to 9-year-olds reveals integrative trait reasoning and a negativity bias

Effective social interaction requires reasoning about people’s traits. Relatively little is known about how children revise their trait inferences of others. This study examined impression updating in 6-9-year-olds (N = 162, M age = 7.96, 52.5% female, 53.1% White) by presenting targets whose behaviors changed in valence over time. Children engaged in integrative trait reasoning: they considered targets’ full behavioral history when making niceness judgments. There was a surprising negativity bias, where children updated more in the positive-to-negative direction compared to the opposite. In addition, the findings showed that behavioral frequency information matters more with increasing age, and that ambiguous impressions may have consequences for downstream predictions. These findings highlight the flexibility and limitations of children’s trait theories.