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Taking Decisions Seriously: Young Children's Understanding of Conventional Truth
Author(s) -
Kalish Charles,
Weissman Michelle,
Bernstein Debra
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8624.00229
Subject(s) - psychology , convention , reality testing , false belief , affect (linguistics) , social psychology , developmental psychology , theory of mind , cognitive psychology , epistemology , cognition , sociology , social science , communication , philosophy , neuroscience
Research suggests that young children may see a direct and one‐way connection between facts about the world and epistemic mental states (e.g., belief). Conventions represent instances of active constructions of the mind that change facts about the world. As such, a mature understanding of convention would seem to present a strong challenge to children's simplified notions of epistemic relations. Three experiments assessed young children's abilities to track behavioral, representational, and truth aspects of conventions. In Experiment 1, 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children ( N = 30) recognized that conventional stipulations would change people's behaviors. However, participants generally failed to understand how stipulations might affect representations. In Experiment 2, 3‐, 5‐, and 7‐year‐old children ( N = 53) were asked to reason about the truth values of statements about pretenses and conventions. The two younger groups of children often confused the two types of states, whereas older children consistently judged that conventions, but not pretenses, changed reality. In Experiment 3, the same 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds ( N = 42) participated in tasks assessing their understanding of representational diversity (e.g., false belief). In general, children's performance on false‐belief and ‘false‐convention’ tasks did not differ, which suggests that conventions were understood as involving truth claims (as akin to beliefs about physical reality). Children's difficulties with the idea of conventional truth seems consistent with current accounts of developing theories of mind.