“What Do You Think You Should Do Now?” Theory of Mind, Deontic Reasoning and Parent-Child Conversations About Minds and Rules

• In Event: Tell me, What’s on Your Mind? An Exploration of Mental-State Talk Discussions

Abstract

Increasingly, evidence suggests important cross-cultural differences in the developmental trajectories of children’s ToM development. The role, however, of deontic reasoning—reasoning about what can, should and must be done—tends to be understated despite its crucial role in social reasoning (Wellman, 2008). Questions also remain as to the cause of differences in the timing and trajectories of social understanding. For instance, we know relatively less about the importance of discussions about social norms and rules for children in cultural contexts that favor cultural mandates of interdependence.

This study extends our cross-cultural knowledge of the trajectory of children’s social understanding by mapping the development trajectories of both ToM and deontic development in a Malaysian context. Our interest is in understanding the extent to which cultural contexts of interdependence favor deontic reasoning, and the differential effects of parental discussions about mental states versus social norms and rules.

To date, our sample consists of 28 parent-child dyads, M = 74 months (range: 46 – 102 months), with the final goal of recruiting 70 dyads by January 2021. Children were given the Wellman ToM scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) and a set of deontic tasks that tested their reasoning about outcomes when social rules are in conflict with personal desires, beliefs and knowledge states (Clement, Bernard & Kaufmann, 2011; Wang, Zhu, & Shi, 2011). Parent-child conversations were elicited using a picture description task and coded for mental states and references to norms and rules (Taumoepeau, Sadeghi, Nobilo 2019). All tasks were adapted for online delivery, in direct response to the effects of Covid-19 on our capacity to engage in face-to-face research.

Preliminary analysis suggests that ToM development in Malaysia may follow the non-Western sequence (Wellman & Liu, 2004), where understanding sources of knowledge precedes understanding of diverse beliefs. Findings for deontic task performance were mixed: Implicit (rather than explicit) rules, where the rule is inferred from emotional responses to the protagonist’s behavior, appear to assist children’s performance in the modified FB task. Children also fared slightly better in a knowledge-ignorance task with conventional rules than in the FB task with explicit social rules. Children did not favor following rules over personal desires and the presence of explicit rules in social scenarios did not promote their performance in a modified FB task. Preliminary findings from 15 coded conversations indicate that although Malaysian parents’ referred more to mental states of the child and others, than norms and rules, references to norms and rules were observed at a similar level to Iranian parent–child conversations, rather than New Zealand European conversations (Taumoepeau, Sadeghi & Nobilo, 2019). In the full sample, we will test for specific associations between parental talk and children ToM and deontic reasoning. These findings will contribute to a broader discussion about the role of culture in promoting specific developmental trajectories of social understanding.

Authors

• Hsiu-Ping Tan, University of Otago
  Presenting Author

• Mele Taumoepeau, University of Otago
  Non-Presenting Author