Karen Bartsch - US grants

By the age of 4 or 5 children come to understand that other people have mental states such as desires, beliefs, hopes, and fears. This understanding provides a foundation for development of social knowledge and social skills. For example, realization that other people are mental beings like oneself is prerequisite for developing an understanding of why people behave as they do, and how to interact successfully with others. This project investigates an important issue that has received little attention: How do children use their understanding of mental states in social interactions? Specifically, the project focuses on children's ability to use mental state understanding in attempts at persuasion, and how this ability develops between age 4 and adulthood. One study will examine children's persuasion attempts in real-life situations through analyses of a large database of children's speech. In other experiments children will be presented with scenarios involving persuasion (e.g., a child attempting to persuade a parent to buy an animal), and asked to create or select a persuasive argument. The results should further our understanding of children's cognitive and social development, and should also have implications for educating children about people and the social world.

Children often attempt to persuade their parents and friends. At what age do they begin to tailor their arguments to the beliefs and attitudes of those individuals? Even preschoolers may possess such persuasive sophistication, according to theoretical accounts of children's developing social cognition and recent findings concerning young children's understanding of mental states. This research will use experimental interviews and analysis of everyday conversations to clarify whether, when, and how young children engage in psychologically sensitive persuasion. Because recent findings have indicated that children acquire an understanding of belief and its role in action during the preschool years, this research will focus on whether and when young children utilize belief information in their persuasion attempts, how typical are such efforts, and how development of this ability occurs. Experimental studies will involve individual interviews requiring young children to engage in persuasion with puppets or other people. Information about the beliefs of each "persuadee" will be systematically manipulated in order to measure effects on children's persuasion. These experimental manipulations will address the basic question of whether young children can engage in psychologically sensitive persuasion. They will also compare children's reasoning about belief as measured by traditional tasks to their belief reasoning on persuasion tasks, a first step towards understanding developmental progression. Experimental studies will also address questions concerning how "real" are the skills revealed in young children and which task factors appear to facilitate children's use of belief information in persuasion. Specifically, the research will examine how children's sensitivity to belief information in persuasion depends on how belief information is presented, how persuasive arguments are elicited, and whether interactions are with puppets or real people. Whether young children consider beliefs as representations or merely get ideas for arguments from belief information will also be examined. Finally, an analysis of children's everyday talk with parents (from transcripts of family conversations sampled throughout the preschool period) will provide a complementary "real-life" and longitudinal perspective on children's developing use of psychological information in persuasion. Together, these studies will provide extensive and novel descriptive data concerning children's use of their developing understanding of mental states in an important and common type of social interaction, persuasion. Results will bear on how development occurs, specifically with regard to belief understanding and application to persuasion, and generally with regard to whether conceptual development precedes social application or the reverse. The resulting descriptive and explanatory data should inform educational and developmental practices.