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Revisiting Young Children's Understanding of the Psychological Causes of Behavior
Author(s) -
Miller Patricia H.,
AloiseYoung Patricia A.
Publication year - 2017
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/cdev.12891
Subject(s) - psychology , developmental psychology , cognition , social cognition , cognitive development , perspective (graphical) , theory of mind , transformative learning , context (archaeology) , child development , preference , social psychology , paleontology , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , computer science , biology , economics , microeconomics
In 1989, Miller and Aloise challenged the prevailing belief that preschoolers tend to explain others' behavior in terms of external events or a person's physical attributes and have little understanding of psychological causes. That review documented preschoolers' understanding of, and even preference for, psychological causes as part of an emerging renaissance in developmental social‐cognitive research. The present, updated review (97 articles, participant ages 3 months to 6 years) suggests the emergence of a transformative new perspective in which social‐cognition is balanced between social and cognitive aspects rather than tilted toward cognition. Recent research on infants' awareness of mental states, young children's understanding of social categories and their judgments of the trustworthiness of informants, and cultural context reveals various ways in which preschoolers' social‐causal reasoning is social.