Poster #199 - Young Children’s Theory of Mind Performance According to the Protagonist’s Group Membership

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

The aim of the present study is to investigate whether young children recruit theory of mind (ToM) differently for ingroup and outgroup members. Todd, Hanko, Galinsky, and Mussweiler (2011) found that adults were more egocentric in false belief tasks when the protagonist was an ingroup than an outgroup member. The authors suggest that perceived similarity can lead to difficulties in acknowledging conflicting perspectives. McLoughlin and Over (2017) found that young children were more likely to use mental-state terms when describing an ingroup than an outgroup member’s actions, suggesting that children’s ToM recruitment can differ according to their target’s group membership. We were interested in extending such studies by investigating whether young children’s performance in ToM tasks would differ according to the group membership of the protagonist.
Fifty-three 3- to 5-year old children have participated in this study so far, but data collection is still ongoing. Children were introduced to gender-matched ingroup and outgroup characters (either in terms of minimal group or geographic group). They were then administered explicit attitude, shared preferences, and resource allocation tasks to confirm that the group manipulations were able to induce intergroup bias. Children were then administered three ToM tasks (diverse desires, false belief, real-apparent emotion) with either an ingroup or an outgroup member as the protagonist. Finally, children were administered a receptive vocabulary and an executive function measure as control variables. With regards to intergroup bias, children tended to favor ingroup than outgroup members in explicit attitude, shared preferences, and resource allocation, when compared to chance level. With regards to ToM performance, the group membership of the protagonist had an effect on the performance of older children (M age = 61 months), but not younger children (M age = 48 months). The protagonist’s group membership did not have an effect on younger children’s performance in all three ToM tasks, suggesting that they did not take into account cues about the protagonist’s group membership when making ToM judgments. Older children performed significantly better in the false belief and the real-apparent emotion task when the protagonist was an outgroup member than an ingroup member, but only the latter remained significant after controlling for vocabulary and executive function. The protagonist’s group membership did not affect older children’s performance in the diverse desires task. Older children’s potential enhancement of false belief understanding with outgroup protagonists is consistent with Todd et al.’s (2011) results that perceived similarity can disrupt the recognition of conflicting perspectives. Older children may have performed better in the real-apparent emotion task with outgroup protagonists as the task involved stories in which the protagonist was engaging in potentially negative behavior (e.g. hiding truth from mother, seeing someone trip and finding it funny). Previous studies have shown that children tend to associate negative behaviors with outgroup than ingroup members (e.g. Dunham & Emory, 2014). Overall, this study suggests that children’s performance in ToM tasks could be affected by the target’s group membership.

Authors

• Mioko Sudo, University of Florida
  Presenting Author

• Megan Jones, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicole Harrell, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael. J Farrar, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author