Social Perspective-Taking and Event Sequences: A Developmental Study

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to examine the relationships between abilities to reconstruct sequences of social events, competences in social perspective-taking, and conservation skill as an index of the reversibility operation. It was expected that conservation (i.e., the reversibility operation) would developmentally precede competence in both forward and backward temporal reconstruction and would be conditional to the latter; that forward temporal reconstruction would develop prior to backward temporal reconstruction; and that both reconstruction abilities would be prerequisites to competences in social perspective-taking. Three groups of 16 children each, whose mean ages were 5.5, 6.8, and 8.7 yr., were presented tasks assessing the above abilities. Analysis indicated that reconstruction of social-event sequences precedes solutions in social and non-social reasoning.