Social-Emotional Interpretive Theory of Mind

• In Event: ToM in Middle Childhood: New Directions and Link to Social Abilities

Abstract

Do children and adults recognize that people will have diverse reactions to the same person based on their distinct past experiences with that individual? We bridge the literatures on interpretive theory of mind (awareness that people can have diverse interpretations; Lalonde & Chandler, 2002), past-to-future reasoning (recognition that past experiences bias later mental states; Lagattuta, 2014), and curse of knowledge (difficulty inhibiting one’s own privileged knowledge; Birch & Bloom, 2007) to address this question. The goal was to provide new insights into advanced psychological understanding during middle childhood and adulthood.

Eight- to 10-year-olds (n=54) and adults (n=56) responded to scenarios where an Actor helped or harmed a Target. On some trials, the Actor also helped or harmed a second Target. For trials with two Targets, we told participants that the Targets did not know what happened to each other. We included four trial types: Negative (N: Actor harms Target 1); Positive (P: Actor helps Target 1); Negative-Positive (NP; Actor harms Target 1 and then helps Target 2); Positive-Negative (PN; Actor helps Target 1 and then harms Target 2). Participants reasoned about the future mental states and decisions of Targets when re-encountering the Actor (emotion; trait evaluation, prosocial responding; all DVs measured on a 0 to 100 scale with 0 being most negative and 100 being most positive). Of key interest was whether participants could isolate each Target’s individual perspective from their privileged knowledge of the Actor’s treatment of both persons.

We conducted a 2 (age) x 3 (past: N, NP, PN) repeated measures ANOVA on average anticipated mental states for Targets of negative behaviors. All effects were null, Fs < 2.80, ps > .063, ηp²s > .03, indicating that children and adults can inhibit their knowledge of positive social information when reasoning about how Targets of negative behaviors will respond. A 2 (age) x 3 (past: P, NP, PN) repeated measures ANOVA on average anticipated mental states for Targets of positive behaviors resulted in a main effect for past, F(2, 216) = 12.99, p < .001, ηp²s = .11. Participants’ knowledge of the Actors’ capability to harm shaped their expectations of how characters who had only experienced positive events would feel. That is, Targets of positive actions in NP and PN trials were erroneously judged to respond more negatively to the Actor than Targets of singular P trials (ps < .001; see Figure 1), even though all three characters previously had only positive interactions with the Actor. Additional analyses at the level of the individual judgment (e.g., emotion, trait evaluation) confirmed that privileged knowledge of negative (versus positive) social information more consistently disrupted perspective taking.

This novel paradigm reveals persistent errors in 8- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ mental state reasoning. Consistent with a negativity bias (Baumeister et al., 2001), privileged negative social information compromised perspective taking more than privileged positive information. To further test the flexibility and limits of advanced theory of mind, additional analyses will assess participants’ beliefs about the reactions of fully knowledgeable and fully naïve characters.

Authors

• Hannah Jean Kramer, Queen’s University Belfast
  Presenting Author

• Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author