Octonauts - National Identity and Attribution Theory

Children develop a sense of their own national identities, and knowledge of and attitudes towards other nations, around five to seven years old. Though multiple psychological studies explore the role of media in children learning about national identities, little work exists considering how national identities are used to explain fictional character behaviours from a psychological perspective, or the role of attribution theory in helping us understand behavioural explanations for children. To address this, content and discourse analyses, and an adapted version of Kelley’s covariation model of attribution theory, were applied to the children’s television series Octonauts to determine how behaviours were explained to children and how these explanations related to character national identities. Finings show that most behaviours were explained through internal attributions, with some national identities assigned to explain character behaviours and relationships, whilst also propagating negative representations of nations. Findings also discuss missed opportunities to enhance the geographic knowledge of children, and how behavioural change efforts relate to the moral development of children within a national identity context.