Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.

How Preschoolers Use Cues of Dominance to Make Sense of Their Social Environment

“…However, another line of research has succeeded in extending social cognition from the processing of other individuals' minds to the interactions of individuals within and across social groups. Within the folk sociology framework developed by Jackendoff (1995) and (Hirschfeld, 1995), some developmental psychologists have undertaken the description of cognitive strategies that allow children to process group membership (Kinzler, Shutts, & Correll, 2010;Rhodes, 2013), deontic reasoning (Clément, Bernard, & Kaufmann, 2011) and social alliances (Pietraszewski & German, 2013;Rhodes & Chalik, 2013 …”

Normative Social Role Concepts in Early Childhood

“…Instead of marking regularities in underlying psychological traits or preferences, children often view category membership as marking explicitly deontic obligations-what people are supposed to or are allowed to do (e.g., Chalik & Rhodes, 2014). Deontic properties are particularly salient for young children (Cl ement, Bernard, & Kaufmann, 2011;Martin et al, 2002). For instance, preschoolers often focus more on social rules than psychological states to explain behavior (Kalish & Shiverick, 2004), predict that deontic properties, but not psychological states, will be shared among social category members (Kalish & Lawson, 2008), and generalize deontic norms, but not psychological states, across members of novel social categories, whereas adults generalize both (Kalish, 2012).…”

Rule Breaking in the Child Care Centre: Tensions for Children and Teachers

“…Conventional rules hold power as young children are strongly motivated to participate in social situations and will actively monitor social cues and rules that provide entry (Clément et al 2011;Diesendruck and Markson 2011;Tomasello 2001). This may explain Tougu and Tulviste's (2010) finding that children referenced conventional rules almost three times more than moral rules in spite of the fact that children consider breaking moral rules to be more serious.…”

“…Developmental theories suggest children's rule transgression is an outcome of their developing ability to regulate internal states when the rule impinges upon their autonomy or desires (Clément et al 2011;Wang, Bernas and Eberhard 2008). Clément et al (2011) state that in developmental psychology an extended theory of mind promotes a framework that includes children's understanding of the notions of 'obligation to others' which act as a gatekeeper of social behaviour. An alternative explanation is that children's meaning making systems do not tolerate monotony for long, urging them to test out the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour through their own novel inventions (Corsaro and Molinari 2000;Valsiner 2000).…”