Children's Attention to Others' Beliefs during Persuasion: Improvised and Selected Arguments to Puppets and People

Abstract

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 (forcedchoice 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.

Development and Persuasion Understanding: Predicting Knowledge of Persuasion/Selling Intent From Children's Theory of Mind

“…In fact, understanding persuasion may represent an advanced development in the child's ToM. Specifically, in order for the child to recognize that he or she is a target of a persuasion attempt, the child must not only appreciate that other people have feelings and motivations which are separate from their own, but they must also come to realize that those doing the persuading are actively trying to change the child's own attitudes and belief states (Bartsch, Wade, & Estes, ).…”

“…Last, there is evidence from other areas of child development which suggest that persuasion understanding is linked to ToM development as these areas conceptually overlap with understanding persuasion. Research in the areas of children's understanding of teaching (Davis‐Unger & Carlson, ; Ziv et al, ), the creation of persuasive appeals (Bartsch & London, ; Bartsch, London, & Campbell, ; Bartsch et al, ) and both the understanding and practice of deception (Hala, Chandler, & Fritz, ; Sodian, Taylor, Harris, & Perner, ; Talwar & Lee, ) are all related to ToM development.…”

Do You Do as I Do?: Young Toddlers Prefer and Copy Toy Choices of Similarly Acting Others

“…Further, if toddlers generalized matched 8 GERSON, BEKKERING, & HUNNIUS action tendencies (i.e., choosing the same toys) between self and other (puppet) across individual trials to novel toys, they should choose the same toy as the puppet who shared their preferences during familiarization when introduced to new toys in toy choice test trials. The use of puppets as social partners and mentalistic agents is well established (e.g., Bartsch, Wade, & Estes, 2011;Hamlin & Wynn, 2012;Mahajan & Wynn, 2012;Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008) and allowed us to control and match actions with fewer experimenters. In a second condition, we controlled for the possibility of a mere perceptual association between one of the puppets and the toys preferred by the child.…”

The Key Practice, Discuss and Debate Ideas: Conceptual Framework, Literature Review, and Provisional Learning Progressions for Argumentation

“…As Wilson (, p. 15) pointed out, approaches to persuasive communication focus on strategy selection (Seibold & Meyers, ) and goal pursuit (Wilson, ), though both must be understood in a context of social interaction where the ways in which one person tries to convince another are highly dependent on relationships and social context. The development of persuasive skills appears to be related to the development of theory of mind with older children but not with prekindergarten‐age children, showing clear evidence of taking beliefs attributed to others into account when devising persuasive strategies (Bartsch & London, ; Bartsch, Wade, & Estes, ).…”