Children’s conception of heroes, villains, the self, and others in China: A developmental study

Children learn about good and bad people from storybooks and cultural representations of heroes and villains. To probe their ideas about good and bad people, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, 8-year-olds in China proved able to conceptualize goodness and badness in a graded rather than a dichotomous fashion. They located heroes at the upper end of a vertical scale, villains at the lower end, and ordinary children in between. In Experiment 2, a wider age range of children evaluated five figures (a hero; a villain; the self; a best friend; and an ordinary child). Children again showed a non-dichotomous scaling. They positioned the hero at the upper end and the villain at the lower end. In the intervening space, children positioned a best friend above the self and the self above an ordinary child. With age, children's differentiation between the self and an ordinary child decreased.