Sociocultural input facilitates children’s developing understanding of extraordinary minds
Lane, Jonathan D, Wellman, Henry M, Evans, ESociocultural input facilitates children’s developing understanding of extraordinary minds Margaret
28 Feb 2012
May/June 2012
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Child Development
83
3
1007-1021
10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01741.x
Sociocultural input facilitates children’s developing understanding of extraordinary minds
<p>Three- to 5-year-old (N = 61) religiously schooled preschoolers received theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks about the mental states of ordinary humans and agents with exceptional perceptual or mental capacities. Consistent with an anthropomorphism hypothesis, children beginning to appreciate limitations of human minds (e.g., ignorance) attributed those limits to God. Only 5-year-olds differentiated between humans’ fallible minds and God’s less fallible mind. Unlike secularly schooled children, religiously schooled 4-year-olds did appreciate another agent’s less fallible mental abilities when instructed and reminded about those abilities. Among children who understood ordinary humans’ mental fallibilities, knowledge of God predicted attributions of correct epistemic states to extraordinary agents. Results suggest that, at a certain point in ToM development, sociocultural input can facilitate an appreciation for extraordinary minds.</p>
In Press
Tagged: Conceptions of Biology and Health | Developmental Methodology | Journal Article
posted by Shakir, Sheba
