Children's judgments and attributions in response to the "mentally retarded" label: a developmental approach.

Labels implying deviance or handicap can have stigmatizing effects. However, developmental theory and research suggest that such label effects may depend on cognitive processes that only develop in later childhood—processes such as trait inference and the logical linkage of attributions, expectancies, and behavior prescriptions. To test this possibility, we had third, sixth, and ninth graders watch a videotape in which a child failed a puzzle task; all of the students had identical information about the child's achievement scores and puzzle ability, but half were told that the child was mentally retarded. Consistent with key person perception and social cognition findings, the traidike retarded label had little impact on younger children but strong effects on older ones. Like adults in earlier research, sixth and ninth graders saw low effort as a less important cause of failure for the retarded than for the unlabeled child, and they saw less need to urge the retarded child to persist. Correlations showed no evidence of logical linkages among attributions, expectancies, and persistence-urging among third graders, but strong linkages among sixth and ninth graders. The findings suggest that label effects are mediated by cognitive processes dependent on developmental level.