Theory of mind and preschoolers’ understanding of misdeed and politeness lies.

Abstract

We told ninety-nine 4- and 5-year-olds stories in which speakers told lies and truths in two contexts: those told to deny a transgression (misdeeds) and those told to spare another’s feelings (politeness). Participants identified each statement as a lie or as the truth, morally judged it as good or bad, and decided whether or not to assign punishment to the speaker. All children received measures of first- and second-order false-belief understanding. Although 4-year-olds were above chance in their identification accuracy, they did not differentiate between lies and truths in their moral judgments or punishments. Five-year-olds outperformed 4-year-olds in their identification accuracy, morally judged lies more negatively than truths, and assigned speakers of lies more punishment than those who told truths. Five-year-olds also treated lies about misdeeds more negatively than politeness lies in their moral judgments and punishments. Children’s identification of both lies and truths related to their first-order false-belief understanding, while their moral judgments and punishment of lies related to their second-order false-belief understanding. These findings suggest that different considerations are made when children reason about the conceptual and moral differences between lies and truths.

Future-Oriented Thinking: Saving, Prospective Memory, and Planning in Young Children

“…Typically, there would have been 12 trials in each set, and participants would have continued with a new set until they make eight mistakes in a set, and each set would have become more difficult. However, for the purpose of the present study an abbreviated version would have been used (as done in Skwarchuk et al, 2014;Vendetti, et al, 2019). All participants would have begun where five-year-olds begin (Set three) and would end when eight or more errors are made, or when they reach Set 11 (whichever comes first).…”

Moral Reasoning: The Roles of Theory of Mind and Social Anxiety in Preschoolers

“…(p. 71). At least one study has found that children demonstrate greater sensitivity to intention in their answers to punishment questions than to moral judgment questions (Zelazo et al, 1996), while others have found them to be very consistent with one another (Vendetti, Kamawar & Andrews, 2019).…”

“…More recently, Vendetti et al (2019) investigated children's understanding of different kinds of truths and lies to see how they related to ToM. Lies were defined as the act of intentionally making a false statement (that the speaker knows to be false) in order to deceive and instill this false belief in another.…”

“…Participants would have received two first-order false belief tasks (see Appendix D). The first would have been a change of location task adapted by Vendetti, Kamawar, and Andrews (2019) from Wimmer and Perner (1983). For this task children would have been told a story about a character who leaves an object in one location which is then moved to another location by a second character without the first character's knowledge.…”

“…Where will Jill first look for the ball?" The other first-order false belief task would have been an unexpected contents task adapted by Vendetti et al (2019) from Gopnik and Astington (1988). In this task children would have been shown a cardboard Crayola box and asked what they thought was inside.…”