Regular Article
Social and Temperamental Influences on Children's Overestimation of Their Physical Abilities: Links to Accidental Injuries,☆☆,

https://doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1997.2411Get rights and content

Abstract

This study examined social and temperamental influences on children's judgments about their physical abilities and relations between temperamental characteristics, ability overestimation, and accidental injuries. Six- and 8-year-olds first observed a peer succeed or fail on a set of physical tasks and then made judgments about their ability to perform those same physical tasks. At both ages, children who first watched a peer fail on the tasks made more conservative judgments about their own abilities than did children who watched the peer succeed. The relations between temperamental characteristics and judgment ability differed for the two ages. An aggregated temperament measure of Surgency/Undercontrol was related to judgment accuracy for 6-year-olds and to decision times for 8-year-olds. Likewise, the relations between temperament, ability overestimation, and accidental injuries differed for the two age groups. Ability overestimation was related to accidental injuries for 6-year-old boys whereas temperamental characteristics were related to accidental injuries for 8-year-olds. These findings suggest that both the factors that put children at risk for accidental injuries and the relations between temperamental characteristics and cognitive abilities change with development.

References (27)

  • K.E. Adolph

    Psychophysical assessment of toddlers' ability to cope with slopes

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

    (1995)
  • K.E. Adolph et al.

    Crawling versus walking infants' perception of affordances for locomotion over sloping surfaces

    Child Development

    (1993)
  • P. Bijur et al.

    Behavioral predictors of injury in school-age children

    American Journal of Diseases of Children

    (1988)
  • L. Festinger

    A theory of social comparison

    Human Relations

    (1954)
  • J.J. Gibson

    The ecological approach to visual perception

    (1979)
  • D.L. Jaquess et al.

    Previous injuries and behavior problems predict children's injuries

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (1994)
  • G. Kochanska et al.

    Inhibitory control as a contributor to conscience in childhood: From toddler to early school age

    Child Development

    (1997)
  • J. Langley et al.

    Child behavior and accidents

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (1983)
  • D.N. Lee et al.

    A roadside simulation of road crossing for children

    Ergonomics

    (1984)
  • D. Manheimer et al.

    Personality characteristics of the child accident repeater

    Child Development

    (1967)
  • R. Martin et al.

    Common sense models of stress and illness in children

    (1996, May)
  • A.P. Matheny

    Injuries among toddlers: Contributions from child, mother, and family

    Journal of Pediatric Psychology

    (1986)
  • K.A. Matthews et al.

    Measurement of the Type A behavior pattern in children: Assessment of children's competitiveness, impatience-anger, and aggression

    Child Development

    (1980)
  • Cited by (116)

    • Why do young children overestimate their task performance? A cross-cultural experiment

      2023, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Adding to this evidence, research has shown that slightly older children, from 6 years of age, are able to use social information to provide more accurate estimates of their ability. For example, children who watched a same-aged peer fail on a set of physical tasks subsequently made more conservative estimates of their own abilities as compared with their counterparts who saw the peer succeed (Plumert & Schwebel, 1997). Together, these findings suggest that cognitive immaturity (i.e., lack of ability) is not the sole explanation for children’s self-overestimation: Even if young children are able to monitor and accurately process their own (as well as their peers’) performance, they somehow fail to consistently or fully incorporate this information into their performance estimates.

    • Decision-making and overconfidence in preschool children: The role of psychopathy features

      2020, Personality and Individual Differences
      Citation Excerpt :

      It refers to the tendency to overestimate one's performance, skill, knowledge and/or judgment. A number of studies have shown that children are overconfident in terms of performance on physical tasks (e.g., Plumert & Schwebel, 1997; Schneider, 1998; Stipek, Roberts, & Sanborn, 1984). For example, Plumert (1995) demonstrated that 6- and 8-year-olds overestimated their ability to perform physical tasks that were within or beyond their ability, but after experience, 8-year-olds were more accurate about tasks that were well beyond their ability.

    • Development of affordance perception and recalibration in children and adults

      2019, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Furthermore, differences in riskiness between younger and older children (Dekker & Nardini, 2015; Ishak et al., 2014, O’Neal et al., 2018; Plumert, 1995) might relate to how often children choose to practice. Finally, this age range is important to study because children’s affordance judgment errors in the lab are predictive of accidental injury rates in daily life (Plumert, 1995; Plumert & Schwebel, 1997), so understanding how recalibration develops has potential implications for designing interventions to reduce accidental injuries during childhood. In a block of decision trials, participants judged whether they could squeeze through doorways that varied in width.

    • Children's perception of action boundaries and how it affects their climbing behavior

      2018, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Hence, there could be a relationship between children’s sensitivity to their action boundaries and their climbing ability. Although there are a few studies that have simultaneously measured perception of reaching capabilities and related actions or accident proneness in children (Johnson & Wade, 2007; Plumert, 1995; Plumert & Schwebel, 1997; Schwebel et al., 2003), few studies have directly related action capability judgments and the behavior that they reputedly support in task settings that are representative or true to the environments in which people act. Given that action capabilities and environmental properties are in continual flux (Wagman, 2012), it is important that affordance research explores behavior in representative task settings.

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    This research was supported by a University of Iowa Spelman Rockefeller Child Research Seed Grant. The authors thank the following individuals for their assistance in data collection and coding: Stephanie Dawes, Dana Dunisch, Jason Fine, Andrea Harmon, Damien Ihrig, Jennifer Kreps, Penney Nichols-Whitehead, Melissa Sandvick, Susan Totten, and Azure Welborn. We also thank Grazyna Kochanska for her helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

    ☆☆

    Address reprint requests to Jodie M. Plumert, Department of Psychology, 11 SSH East, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242.

    S. ChessA. ThomasM. E. Hertzig, Eds.

    View full text