Poster #132 - Theory of Mind and Moral Reasoning. A Four-Year Longitudinal Study

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

The importance of the acquisition of a Theory of Mind for children’s understanding of moral intentions has been documented in 4- to 7-year-old children by Killen et al. (2011). An understanding of the intentions underlying an act is at the core of moral reasoning, i.e., of reasoning in terms of fairness and rights or in terms of others’ welfare (Smetana, et al., 2014). Therefore, we expect children’s morally relevant Theory of Mind (i.e., their understanding of beliefs and intentions in a moral context) to be predictive of their later moral reasoning abilities.
We tested this prediction in a longitudinal study of N= 120 children (54 girls) from middle income families in Germany, who were assessed with the “accidental transgressor” interview by Killen et al. (2011) at the age of 6 years, and with two moral transgression interviews (hitting and not sharing) at the age of 8 years. Standard false belief tests (explicit false belief task, contents false belief task; Wellman & Liu, 2004) were assessed in the same sample at the age of 4 years. Children’s reasoning in the moral transgression tasks at the age of 8 years was coded based on responses to a series of open-ended questions, such as why it was allright or not allright to commit the transgression, whether the act would be judged as allright if an authority figure said so, whether it would be allright to retaliate what a teacher could do to solve the conflict, and whether and how the transgressor and the victim could be friends again.
Moral reasons (reasoning in terms of fairness and rights, others’ welfare and prosociality) were distinguished from social conventional and other types of reasons. A sumscore of moral reasons was computed for each participant on each interview (see Ardila-Rey, Killen, & Brenick, 2009 ). The moral reasoning scores for both the violation of negative (Story 1) and positive (Story 2) duties were significantly correlated with both the MOTOM False belief and intention score at the age of six years, and the standard false belief tasks at the age of 4 years (all r >.20, p<.05). Only the correlations of TOM predictors and Story 2 moral reasoning remained significant, however, when verbal IQ and executive functions were partialled out (r=.27, p=.01, df=90 with MOTOM, and r=.24, p=.02, df=94 with standard false belief tasks). In sum, these findings support the view that Theory of Mind development is related to the development of moral reasoning. This effect appears to be limited to reasoning about the violation of prosocial moral norms. This may be due to the higher demands on perspective taking involved in reasoning about prosocial norms, which are more context dependent than negative duties that must not be violated under any condition. The findings will be discussed in the broader context of research on Theory of Mind and the development of prosociality (e.g.,Imuta, Henry, Slaughter, Selcuk, & Ruffman, 2016).

Authors

• Beate Sodian, LMU Munich
  Presenting Author

• Susanne Kristen-Antonow, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melanie Killen, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author