The Development of Reversible Operations in Judgments of Ability, Effort, and Performance

ments of ability, effort, and performance confonn to the predictions of Harold Kelley's theory of causal schemata was examined at 4 age levels (college, fifth grade, third grade, and kinder-garten). Subjects made 3 kinds of judgments: (1) judgment of performance, given ability and effort; (2) judgment of effort, given performance and ability; and (3) judgment of ability, given performance and effort information. Kelley's causal schema concept requires that effort and ability should be judged to be inversely related (when perfonnance is held constant), and that the pattern of judgments (i.e., whether additivity or interactions are found) should be consistent across judged dimensions. The results showed inconsistent use of inverse compensa-tion in judging ability and effort between kindergarten and fifth grade. At the adult level inverse compensation was consistent, but there was no evidence that ability, effort, and performance are integrated into a fully reversible causal schema. 2 possible explanations of the children's inconsistent use of inverse compensation are suggested: (1) it may reflect a normal step in the development of attribution processes for both social and nonsocial events, or (2) it may reflect different interpretations of the meaning of ability and its relationship to effort. Also discussed is the issue of whether the failure of the adults to show a completely reversible causal schema