Search

Until now children's attention to the beliefs of people they wish to persuade has been examined experimentally via tasks that were artificial in important respects. To determine whether such research has underestimated children's psychological perspective taking, two studies that manipulated task elements pertinent to ecological validity were conducted. Children in three age groups (3, 4/5, and 6/7 years) were asked (forced-choice and open-ended formats) how best to persuade puppets and people, with differing beliefs, to pet and play with various toy animals. Children offered as many or more belief-relevant arguments in response to forced-choice as to open-ended questions. Only the oldest group attended to beliefs more when persuading a person compared with a puppet. Even on more realistic tasks, significant improvement with age across task formats confirmed a developmental trajectory in line with extant reports of children's belief reasoning. The findings support the idea that enhanced social competence corresponds specifically to children's increasing attention to beliefs in social interactions such as persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two children's conversations with adults were examined for reference to moral issues using transcripts of archived at-home family talk from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database (MacWhinney, 2000). Through target words (e.g., good, wrong, mean) in transcripts of two children between ages 2.5 and 5.0 years, 1,333 moral conversations were identified. Conversations were examined for whether and when children discussed moral issues, how they used moral words (e.g., to communicate feelings, ask for reasons, etc.), what was discussed and in what contexts, and whether children were active or passive contributors. The resulting case study portraits of early moral sensibility extend and challenge extant findings, revealing substantive differences between the two children's moral sensibilities as well as commonalities, including a tendency to be active rather than passive in moral conversation, to focus on the dispositions/ behaviors of others, and to engage in moral conversation primarily to give/ask for reasons, communicate feelings, and (dis)approve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method for eliciting extended explanations was used to evaluate predictions from the �theory-theory� account of developing psychological reasoning. Children were repeatedly asked to explain the actions or emotions of story characters with false beliefs. Questioning elicited false belief attributions in half of 3-year-olds (Study 1, N = 16, age M = 3;6) and most 4-year-olds who failed belief prediction tasks (Study 2, N = 30, M = 4;5). In Study 3, 30 prediction failers (M = 5;1) gave significantly more false belief explanations for emotions than for actions. Across the studies, desire and emotion explanations emerged early and often, reflecting the primacy of these constructs in the children�s understanding of psychological causality. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for developmental mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether and when children can apply their developing understanding of belief to persuasion was examined using interactive puppet tasks. Children selected 1 of 2 arguments to persuade a puppet to do something (e.g., pet a dog) after hearing the puppet's belief (e.g., ‘I think puppies bite’). Across 2 studies, 132 children (ages 3–7 years) engaged in these persuasion tasks and in false-belief reasoning tasks, presented in puppet and story formats. Belief-relevant argument selection increased with age, as did appropriate reasoning about false beliefs, and occurred more in puppet than story tasks. Results suggest that improvements in belief reasoning in early childhood may be reflected in social interactions such as persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of experience in children''s developing folk epistemology, specifically in their acquisition of an understanding of belief, is explored from the theory–theory perspective (i.e., the perspective claiming that children''s conceptual development can be viewed as analogous to scientific theory development) through a selective review and analysis of extant empirical literature. Three types of investigations are identified: examinations of observed relationships between social experiences and belief understanding, attempts to facilitate the reasoning of children on the verge of belief understanding through experiences intended to compel children to face reasoning inconsistencies; and training studies demonstrating that children can be trained to understand belief over time through specific feedback experiences. A comparison of these studies reveals that experience is defined differently across them, resulting in varying and sometimes ambiguous implications for a theory–theory perspective on development. Implications for future research are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Determines when children specifically begin to use information about people's beliefs to select persuasive arguments. Role of mental state information in children's social reasoning; Children's use of mental state information; Implications of the findings for characterizations of children's developing social cognition.

In response to Wimmer and Mayringer's (this issue) report "False belief understanding in young children: Explanations do not develop before predictions", the theoretical importance of the explanation versus prediction issue is expanded and the empirical conclusion of the report is questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]