Octonauts: national identity and attribution theory

ABSTRACT Children’s sense of their own national identities, and knowledge of and attitudes towards other nations develops around five to seven years old. However, no work considers uses of national identities as fictional character behavioural explanations from a psychological perspective, or the role of attribution in explaining behaviours to children. By applying content and discourse analyses, and an adapted version of Kelley’s covariation model of attribution, to children’s television series Octonauts, this study shows that most behaviours were explained through internal attributions, with some dispositional behaviours reproducing national identity stereotypes as explanations for character behaviours.