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What are the relations of thinking about groups and theory of mind?
Author(s) -
Rakoczy Hannes
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/bjdp.12047
Subject(s) - psychology , citation , experimental psychology , association (psychology) , psychoanalysis , cognitive science , sociology , library science , cognition , computer science , psychotherapist , psychiatry
The paper by Abrams et al. (2014) reports an interesting study on the connection between children’s judgements about social group relations and their theory of mind (ToM). The key finding is that advanced ToM, the capacity to ascribe second-order mental states (‘she believes that he believes that p’), was systematically related to how children thought about the relation between being perceived as typical in a group and being accepted by the group members: children with higher advanced ToM assumed a closer relation such that themore typical other groupmembers take an individual to be, themore they accept and include her in the group. This finding is very interesting in itself. But this line of research is important and promising in the broader context of the study of social-cognitive development more generally. In this broader context, it turns out that research on children’s social-cognitive development is surprisingly fragmented, with different research traditions targeting different kinds of phenomena with little systematic interconnection. Dramatic examples include the study of children’s group cognition, on the one hand, and the study of ToM, on the other hand. Much recent research has investigated the ontogenetic origins of in-/ outgroup cognition from infancy on (e.g., Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007; Powell & Spelke, 2013). And of course, ToM has been one of the most fruitful areas of investigation in early cognitive development over the last three decades. Form the first line of research, we have learned that a tendency to distinguish between inand outgroup members, for example with regard to native language, develops very early in human ontogeny and that the distinction between inand outgroup members usually goes alongwith a preference to interact and affiliate with and to learn from for the former (e.g., (Buttelmann, Zmyj, Daum, & Carpenter, 2013; Kinzler, Corriveau, & Harris, 2011; Kinzler et al., 2007). But so far there has been virtually no investigation of how this precocious group cognition is related to ToM, that is, the capacity to ascribe mental states to individuals fromwithin orwithout a given group. Intuitively, onemight expect that the