Children's use of mental state information in selecting persuasive arguments.

Abstract

Whether and when children use information about others' mental states to invent or select persuasive strategies were examined. In Study 1, preschoolers, 3rd-graders, and 6th-graders (ns --- 11, 12, and 16, respectively; 17 girls) were told about story characters' persuading parents to buy pets or toys. Children were either given or not given information about story parents' beliefs and asked to invent or select appropriate arguments. Older children, but not preschoolers, used belief information to select arguments. Results were replicated in Study 2 (16 kindergartners, 16 3rd-graders; 19 girls). In Study 3, kindergartners and lst-graders (N = 16; 6 girls) reasoned well on false-belief tasks but not on persuasion tasks, suggesting that failure to consider mental states in persuasion was not due to lack of a belief concept. Findings suggest that mental state understanding may continue to develop after the preschool years; methodological qualifications are also considered. In the past decade, researchers have explored when and how children acquire a concept of people as mental beings who experience desires, beliefs, hopes, fears, and so forth. These explorations reflect convictions that such understanding is important and is presumably relevant to children's understanding of themselves and to their interactions with others. One result of this research has been a broad consensus that by 4 or 5 years of age, children share with adults basic mental state concepts and view people as mental beings who experience desires and beliefs (e.g., Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Flavell & Miller, 1998; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Moses & Chandler, 1992). Only recently have researchers begun to address when and how children apply their growing psychological understanding to everyday interactions with other people (e.g., Astington & Jenkins, 1995; Lalonde & Chandler, 1995). The research reported here initiates an examination of children's reasoning in one ubiquitous type of social interaction for which an understanding of mental states might be thought to be important: persuasion. Children often attempt to persuade parents and friends to do things, but when do they begin to tailor their arguments to individuals' mental states? We investigated when children specif