Children’s reasoning about other’s intentions: False-belief and counterfactual conditional inferences

Rasga, Célia; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Byrne, Ruth M. J.

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.08.007

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 54 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…People readily distinguish between actions that are intentional and actions that are not (e.g., Anscombe, 1963;Bratman, 1987;Davidson, 1963;Von Wright, 1983). They rely on intentions to inform their understanding of an agent's actions not only in moral situations (e.g., Cushman & Young, 2011;Knobe, 2010;Nadelhoffer, 2004;Sverdlik, 2004), but also in non-moral ones (e.g., Byrne, 2005;Juhos, Quelhas, & Byrne, 2015;Rasga, Quelhas, & Byrne, 2016;Uttich & Lombrozo, 2010).…”

Section: Intentional and Accidental Violations Of Harm And Puritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Judgments of Moral Responsibility and Wrongness for Intentional and Accidental Harm and Purity Violations

Parkinson

Byrne

2017

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Two experiments examine whether people reason differently about intentional and accidental violations in the moral domains of harm and purity, by examining moral responsibility and wrongness judgments for violations that affect others or the self. The first experiment shows that intentional violations are judged to be worse than accidental ones, regardless of whether they are harm or purity violations-for example, Sam poisons his colleague versus Sam eats his dog, when participants judge how morally responsible was Sam for what he did, or how morally wrong was what Sam did. The second experiment shows that violations of others are judged to be worse than violations of the self, regardless of whether they are harm or purity violations, when their content and context is matched-for example, on a tropical holiday Sam orders poisonous starfruit for dinner for his friend, or for himself, versus on a tropical holiday Sam orders dog meat for dinner for his friend, or for himself. Moral reasoning is influenced by whether the violation was intentional or accidental, and whether its target was the self or another person, rather than by the moral domain, such as harm or purity.

show abstract

Section: Intentional and Accidental Violations Of Harm And Puritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Judgments of Moral Responsibility and Wrongness for Intentional and Accidental Harm and Purity Violations

Parkinson

Byrne

2017

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…So is theory of mind a special case of counterfactual thinking (Riggs, Peterson, Robinson & Mitchell, 1998)? A number of studies in the context of preschool years (see, for instance, Rasga, Quelhas & Byrne, 2016;Riggs et al 1998) confirm, with uneven forcefulness, the relationship between CFR and FB. Additionally, from a neuro-imaging perspective, the FBT and CFR activate similar brain areas (Van Hoeck et al, 2014) and engage processes supporting mental simulations.…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

“…It may be logical to suggest that CFR arises first in a general sense (Harris, 1992), and that only later this type of reasoning, as "a domain-general condition" (Müller et al, 2007, p. 629) is applied to more abstract concepts, such as mental states (Guajardo & Turley-Ames, 2004;Riggs et al, 1998). In fact, the traditional evaluation of ToM and CFR involves the mental state element in the first one but not in the latter (except in some cases, see Guajardo et al, 2009;Rasga et al, 2016), such that the ToM task would require extra cognitive processes in comparison to CFR (Ferguson et al, 2010), that is, reasoning about physical facts seems to be easier than mental ones. Nevertheless, Rasga et al's.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, the traditional evaluation of ToM and CFR involves the mental state element in the first one but not in the latter (except in some cases, see Guajardo et al, 2009;Rasga et al, 2016), such that the ToM task would require extra cognitive processes in comparison to CFR (Ferguson et al, 2010), that is, reasoning about physical facts seems to be easier than mental ones. Nevertheless, Rasga et al's. (2016) results disconfirmed this interpretation and Guajardo et al (2009) found counterfactuals about physical events accounted for more variance in false belief than did counterfactuals about mental events.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The relationship of counterfactual reasoning and false belief understanding: the role of prediction and explanation tasks

Contreras

García-Madruga

2020

Psicológica Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

AbstractThe relation between the prediction and explanation of the false belief task (FBT) with counterfactual reasoning (CFR) was explored. Fifty eight 3-5 year-olds received a prediction or an explanation FBT, a belief attribution task and some counterfactual questions of increasing difficulty. Linguistic comprehension was also controlled. CFR highly predicted FBT in the explanation version but not in the prediction one. Additionally, results in the explanation version indicate that CFR underlies achievements prior to the understanding of the representational mind and stimulates the explicitness of the mental domain. This study identifies the conditions under which CFR becomes a fundamental cognitive tool for social cognition. The results obtained contribute to the dialog between the two major theoretical approaches: theory-theory and simulation theory.

show abstract

“…Moreover, we know that there is a very strong relationship between attribution of intent and behavioural response (Crick and Dodge, 1994; Rothier and Fontaine, 2003). According to Rasga et al (2016), in order to understand the actions of others, we need to reason about their intentions, which requires a theory of mind (TOM). Bibby and McDonald (2005) described TOM as a type of information processing, because it refers to the ability to understand and attribute mental states to others in order to understand and predict what others will do.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral judgement and aggressiveness in children and adolescents with intellectual disability

Oubrahim

Combalbert

Salvano-Pardieu

2019

JIDOB

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence of aggressive behaviour among children and adolescents with intellectual disability (ID) and to demonstrate a possible link with moral judgement. Design/methodology/approach This study was carried out using two scales on a sample of 60 young people with ID in specialized schools. The first scale was “Behavior Problems Inventory-Short Form” (Rojahn et al., 2012) used to assess the frequency of aggressive behaviour and the second involved several scenarios about social situations of aggressiveness to assess moral judgement. Findings The main findings indicate that children and adolescents with ID gave more importance to the factor “consequences” than to that of “intent”. Moreover, there was a link between moral judgement and aggressive behaviour. Indeed, aggressive people found it harder to take into account the other’s point of view. Regarding moral judgement, they gave greater importance to the “consequences” factor than non-aggressive people. Originality/value The study aimed to establish, for the first time, a link between aggressiveness and moral judgement (blame) in ID (Anderson, 1996). This study clearly provides useful information regarding public health for patients, professionals and families. The authors were able to measure a similar frequency of aggressive behaviour in both children and adolescents with ID. The authors also highlighted a link between these aggressive behaviours and moral judgement. This knowledge should enhance understanding of manifestations of aggressiveness in this population, and improve diagnostic assessment. It should also help define appropriate directions for educational interventions to prevent the onset of aggressive behaviour or delinquency.

show abstract

Children’s reasoning about other’s intentions: False-belief and counterfactual conditional inferences

Cited by 15 publications

References 54 publications

Judgments of Moral Responsibility and Wrongness for Intentional and Accidental Harm and Purity Violations

Judgments of Moral Responsibility and Wrongness for Intentional and Accidental Harm and Purity Violations

The relationship of counterfactual reasoning and false belief understanding: the role of prediction and explanation tasks

Moral judgement and aggressiveness in children and adolescents with intellectual disability

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About