Vasu & Morris-> Pretending reading

Vasu & Morris-> Pretending reading

1. It is difficult to write today about understanding people without reference to the words ‘Theory of Mind’.

2. Theory Theory--> the process of understanding other actions by using the theory of mind.

   • This theory asserts that individuals hold a basic or ‘naïve’ theory of psychology ("folk psychology") to infer the mental states of others,[1] such as their beliefs, desires or emotions, and use this information to understand the intentions behind that person’s actions or predict future behavior.
   • Theory-theorists use the term 'perspective taking' to describe how one makes inferences about another person's inner state using theoretical knowledge about the other's situation.[2]
   • This approach has become popular with psychologists as it gives a basis from which to explore human social understanding.
     • Children observe the world, and in doing so, gather data about the world's true structure.
     • As more data accumulates, children can revise their naive theories accordingly
     • Children can also use these theories about the world's causal structure to make predictions, and possibly even test them out.

3. to test for an understanding of representation (and of how representation leads to action) the theory-theory has typically used situations of mismatch between representation and reality

4. theory-theorists argue that telling lies, understanding intentions contrary to actual actions, understanding lack of knowledge and under- standing misunderstandings are all dependent on complex representational skills which do not develop until about 4 years

   • However, all of these predictions are problematic. Children do lie, they do repair misunderstandings, they do tell people things they don’t know, they do tease people and manipulate their intentions, well before the age of 4.

5. Deception and false Belief

   • The claim that children cannot lie until they pass the false-belief task was made partly on the logic of the theory, and partly on the evidence that children with autism and children under the age of 4 both fail the false-belief task and are reported not to lie (Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986).
     • Contradictions: Chandler, Fritz and Hala (1989), who showed that children under 3 can deceive in a laboratory task, although this finding was generally dismissed on the grounds that the children were trained to achieve this (
   • Even the lies of a 21⁄2-year-old were not limited to punishment-avoiding or reward- obtaining: they involved a variety of motives such as face-saving, trickery and fun, and were sometimes complex and creative. These findings were confirmed and extended in an observational study of 2-year-olds (Wilson et al., 2003): not only were 2-year-olds telling a variety of lies, but also, quite contrary to previous assumptions, their lies were no more implausible than those of 4-year-olds.