Functional measurement assessment of young children's ability to predict future behavior.

The reported experiments demonstrate that young children's ability to use previous behavioral information to predict future behavior emerges on quantitative, but not dichotomous, judgment tasks. In a first experiment, kindergartners, second graders, and fourth graders made quantitative liking judgments and predictions for peers after being presented 2 pieces of behavioral information. Children of all 3 age groups used both pieces of information in their liking judgments and predictions. In a second experiment, kindergartners were presented with 2 types of tasks; one was a quantitative prediction, comparable to the task in Experiment 1, and the second were dichotomous predictions, comparable to judgment tasks typically used in other experiments. Children's predictions were significantly more consistent with the behavioral information on the quantitative task than on either of the dichotomous tasks. These results suggest that young children believe in the ability of interpersonal behavior, but have difficulty dealing with the complexity of some prediction tasks.