Although a large number of studies have examined development of children's perception of others' personality, relatively few have studied development of dimensions in the perception. We therefore examined developmental changes in the dimensions: what kind and how many of them were used. We first had 932 female subjects, students from elementary school to college, write down four traits to describe each of three people: someone they like, another they dislike, and themselves. Three coders then classified the answers into the four dimensions that have been considered to underlie person perception: social evaluation, intellectual evaluation, potency, and activity. Results showed that subjects used the dimensions of intellectual evaluation and potency more frequently, and the dimension of social evaluation less frequently, as they got older. It was also shown that the number of dimensions was larger for older subjects.
Key words: person perception, implicit personality theory, cognitive complexity, child development