Developmental Intergroup Theory of Mind: The protagonist’s social group membership as a pragmatic performance factor
[eng] During the early preschool years, the development of the concept of "the self" and "the other" has a significant impact on two socio-cognitive processes (Theory of Mind and social categorization) that have largely been studied separately. Developing an understanding that th...
| Autor: | |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/194367 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/194367 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/687792 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Filosofia de la ment Relacions entre grups Cognició Teoria del coneixement d'un mateix Psicologia del desenvolupament Philosophy of mind Intergroup relations Cognition Theory of self-knowledge Developmental psychology |
| Sumario: | [eng] During the early preschool years, the development of the concept of "the self" and "the other" has a significant impact on two socio-cognitive processes (Theory of Mind and social categorization) that have largely been studied separately. Developing an understanding that there is a “me” and a “you” is crucial to infer someone’s mental states (desires, beliefs, and intentions), which is an indispensable skill for interpersonal relationships. However, when these early developing categorization processes extrapolate the individual distinction (“me” and “you”) to a group distinction (“us” versus “them”), the interpersonal relationships become biased with an indiscriminate preference for those that belong to one’s group. While categorizing is necessary for infants to represent the world in a less taxing manner (Dunham & Olson, 2016) it often triggers stereotypical representations of individuals, not attending to who they are but rather which group they belong to. Children’s performance in false belief (FB) paradigms has been the subject of a heated debate over the last thirty years. The systematic failure of the standard FB tasks before the 4th birthday has been interpreted in divergent manners: nativist accounts attribute it to the high processing demands of the task in relation to children’s underdeveloped executive and attentional resources before that age (e.g., Baillargeon et al., 2010; Leslie, 2005; Leslie et al., 2004; Leslie et al., 2005; Scott et al., 2010); empiricist accounts attribute the failure to a lack of a meta-representational concept of belief (Wellman, 2001; Gopnik and Wellman, 1992) and pragmatic accounts attribute children’s poor performance to the specific contextual elements of the task that make it pragmatically difficult for children (Helming et al., 2016; Rubio-Fernández & Geurts, 2013; Siegal and Beattie, 1991; Westra, 2017). The Outgroup Advantage Pragmatic Account (OAPA) presented in this dissertation is a pragmatic account that attempts to explain children’s difficulty in the FB task through the lens of the cognitive branch of Developmental Intergroup Theory of Mind. The focus of the account is to show that performance in standard FB tasks is not solely linked to children’s competence in attributing false beliefs but rather it is interwoven with pragmatic factors that make the task cognitively demanding. The OAPA establishes that the social group membership of the recipient of the mentalization (the “false-belief holder”) is a pragmatic factor that can influence children’s performance in a task that directly pits the protagonist’s perspective against that of the participant. It predicts that an outgroup protagonist reduces the pragmatic demands of the FB task because it presents an easier target to attribute false beliefs to for three reasons: an outgroup protagonist increases the saliency of the protagonist’s perspective, it increases the protagonist’s expected ignorance, and it clarifies the experimenter’s intent. The experimental work was divided into four sections. In the first section I explored the pragmatic influence of manipulating the protagonist’s social group membership with a real social category (race) and a MGP manipulation in 4-to-5-year-olds’ FB performance. I found that an outgroup protagonist yielded a better performance in the unexpected-contents FB task (Study 1) and influenced the sequential pattern of difficulty of the well-established five- item ToM scale by Wellman and Liu (2004) (Studies 1 and 2). The second section was designed to address the account’s first pragmatic factor: the saliency of the protagonist’s perspective. Studies 3 and 4 provided confirmation that manipulating the saliency of the protagonist’s perspective influenced 4-to-5-year-olds’ FB performance in the unexpected-contents task. The third section was built to test the account’s second pragmatic factor: the protagonist’s expected ignorance. Study 5 demonstrated that a shared-group membership between protagonist and agent made the change-of-location FB task more cognitively demanding for 5-to-6-years-olds. The fourth and last section aimed to test the developmental trajectory of the outgroup advantage in a continuous change-of-location FB task with a population that already mastered standard FB tasks. Testing 8-to-9-year-olds and adults did not show evidence for an outgroup advantage. The summation of the results of the seven studies presented in this dissertation provided confirmative evidence of the OAPA in 4-to-6-year-olds’ performance in FB tasks. The OAPA contributes to a more flexible understanding between competence and performance in children’s mentalizing skills in FB task and suggests a path to develop intervention strategies to prevent children’s intergroup biases. |
|---|