Children’s Developing Theory of Mind

Abstract

Abstract When and how do children come to understand people as thinkers, knowers, wanters, wishers, fearers, hopers, and intentional actors? In addressing these questions, we are lucky that children quickly learn to talk and that they talk not just about the physical world but about themselves and others. Children’s everyday conversations provide an effective window onto their understanding of people and minds, as demonstrated by the 10 children described in the preceding pages. Our findings are not simply empirical; the data are organized around various con ceptual distinctions that underpin and frame the research results. Some of these distinctions were outlined at the start-those between subjective and objective construals, connections and representations, beliefs and desires, for example. Other conceptual analyses were required as we proceeded so that we could more comprehensively characterize children’s conversations, such as our analysis of arguments, and of advance belief versus false belief contrastives. When this conceptual groundwork is in place, then the children’s conversations “speak for themselves.” Amidst our many findings, children’s talk about the mind reveals a relatively clear progression of three phases. There is an early phase when children talk about desires, essentially wants and likes, in a wide variety of situations: desires for objects, desires for actions, desires for current or future states of affairs, and their own desires and the desires of others. Very young children draw revealing contrasts between desires and actions or objects, and they appeal to desires in order to explain human action, emotion, and interaction.