Back to Search
Start Over
Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others.
- Source :
- British Journal of Developmental Psychology; Nov2011, Vol. 29 Issue 4, p910-928, 19p, 2 Illustrations, 1 Chart
- Publication Year :
- 2011
-
Abstract
- The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 0261510X
- Volume :
- 29
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- British Journal of Developmental Psychology
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 66589125
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.2010.02019.x