Young Children's Persuasion in Everyday Conversation: Tactics and Attunement to Others' Mental States

Abstract

Young children's persuasion tactics, and how these reflected attunement to others' mental states, were explored in archived longitudinal samples of transcribed at-home conversations of four children, three to five years old. Over 87,000 utterances were examined to identify conversation 'chunks' involving persuasion; 1,307 chunks were then coded for who initiated the persuasion, the persuader's goal, tactics employed, the presence of cues about others' beliefs and desires, and whether children attended to such information. Analyses suggested that persuasion exchanges were initiated similarly by children and adults, were stable in frequency and length across time, and involved a limited set of persuasion tactics. Children's attempts to change beliefs increased although explicit mental-state cues were only rarely available. When such cues were available, children more often than not altered their tactics. Implications for our understanding of children's developing social cognition and theory of mind, as well as the limitations of conversational analysis, are discussed.

Theory of mind, affective empathy, and persuasive strategies in school‐aged children

“…The opposite trend was found for self-oriented strategies. These results confirm past research (Bartsch & London, 2000;Bartsch et al, 2007Bartsch et al, , 2010Perucchini et al, 2003;Slaughter et al, 2013) and add that the association between persuasion and ToM continues to be significant even when cognitive and affective dimensions of ToM are evaluated. Furthermore, our results highlight that mindreading abilities underpin persuasive tactics designed to produce a change in the persuadee's mind as the result of a negation process.…”

“…Only a few recent studies have directly investigated the relation between ToM and persuasion in preschool and school-aged children (Bartsch, London, & Campbell, 2007;Jianzhi & Weiwei, 2009;McAlister & Cornwell, 2009;Perucchini, Bonaiuto, Colonnesi, & Gnisci, 2003). In them, the use of persuasive strategies was strongly related to the understanding of others' belief (Bartsch & London, 2000;Bartsch et al, 2010Bartsch et al, , 2007. Despite their interesting findings, such studies have limited their attention only to the role of false belief reasoning in persuasion, ignoring other components of ToM.…”

Teaching Is a Natural Cognitive Ability for Humans

“…We suggest that teaching research can benefit from an integrated multidisciplinary effort. Domains that have potential to add to our basic knowledge about teaching include the ontogenetic development of human teaching (Davis‐Unger & Carlson, , ; Strauss et al, ), anthropology (Greenfield, ), cultural evolution (Mesoudi, Whiten, & Laland, ), cognitive evolution (Arbilly, Motro, Feldman, & Lotem, ; Shultz, Nelson, & Dunbar, ), nonhuman animal teaching (comparative psychology) (Thornton & Raihani, , ), brain sciences (Battro, , ), artificial intelligence (Dessus, Mandin, & Zampa, ), cognitive archeology from prehistoric periods (Goren‐Inbar, ), psycholinguistics (Bartsch, Wright, & Estes, ), philosophy (Scheffler, ), intelligent tutoring systems (Kopp, Britt, Millis, & Graesser, ), computer–human interface systems, silicon–biology interfaces, and more.…”

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

“…Data from a natural language study directly focused on persuasion conversations supports aspects of this developmental characterization. Bartsch, Wright, and Estes (in press) examined extensive longitudinal samples of transcribed everyday at‐home conversations in four children between ages 3 and 5 years. Conversational exchanges that involved persuasion were first identified (1307 persuasion ‘chunks’ were found in a search of over 87 000 utterances) and then examined for evidence of attention to beliefs and other psychological states.…”