The Impact of Personal Preference on Consistency through Time: The Case of Childhood Aggression.

BULLOCK, DANIEL, and MERRILL, LAURA. The Impact of Personal Preference on Consistency through Time: The Case of Childhood Aggression. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 808-814. The present experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that a child's activity preferences may predict subsequent changes in that child's aggression, since such preferences partly determine how children allocate their time to situations capable of making them more or less aggressive. Data from a 1-year longitudinal study reveal that (1) boys vary widely in the extent of their preference for aggression-conducive situations, (2) girls have low preference for such situations, and (3) preference has a strong impact on the development of aggression in boys who have not already become either very high or very low in aggression. This phenomenon provides an example of an interesting developmental pattern: Temporal stability in 1 personal characteristic (e.g., preference structure) can lead to directed transformation of another personal characteristic (e.g., typical interpersonal behavior).