YOUNG CHILDRENS ATTRIBUTION OF ACTION TO BELIEFS AND DESIRES
YOUNG CHILDRENS ATTRIBUTION OF ACTION TO BELIEFS AND DESIRES
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DOI：
10.2307/1131035
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发表时间：
1989-08-01
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
WELLMAN, H
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
BARTSCH, K;WELLMAN, H
儿童何时以及如何理解信仰和欲望，对于他们是否曾经是童年的现实主义者，以及他们何时证明一种心理理论是至关重要的。成年人通常将人的行为解释为演员S的信仰和欲望的结果，这是一种常见的、基本的心理学解释形式。我们调查了儿童S的能力，也是如此。在实验1中，60名受试者被要求解释哪些故事人物做了简单的动作，比如在钢琴下面寻找一只小猫。学龄前儿童和成年人都给出了主要的心理解释，将行为归因于演员S的信仰和欲望。即使是3岁的孩子也将行为归因于信念和错误的信念，这表明了他们对信念的理解，这在之前的研究中并不明显。在实验2中，我们进一步测试了24名3岁儿童对错误信念的理解。他们同时被给予错误信念预测和解释任务。儿童在解释任务上表现良好，将异常行为归因于演员S的错误信念，即使他们未能正确预测错误信念会导致什么行为。我们得出的结论是，3岁的儿童和成年人在信仰和欲望方面对人类行为的理解基本相似，甚至是错误的信念。
When and how children understand beliefs and desires is central to whether they are ever childhood realists and when they evidence a theory of mind. Adults typically construe human action as resulting from an actor''s beliefs and desires, a mentalistic interpretation that represents a common and fundamental form of psychological explanation. We investigated children''s ability to do likewise. In Experiment 1, 60 subjects were asked to explain who story characters performed simple actions, such as looking under a piano for a kitten. Both preschoolers and adults gave predominantly psychological explanations, attributing the actions to the actor''s beliefs and desires. Even 3-year-olds attributed actions to beliefs and false beliefs, demonstrating an understanding of belief not evident in previous research. In Experiment 2, 24 3-year-olds were tested further on their understanding of false belief. They were given both false belief prediction and explanation tasks. Children performed well on explanation tasks, attributing an anomalous action to the actor''s false belief, even when they failed to predict correctly what action would follow from a false belief. We concluded that 3-year-olds and adults share a fundamentally similar construal of human action in terms of beliefs and desires, even false beliefs.