The Impact Of Social Interaction On Children's Reasoning About Diverse Desires And Its Mechanism

Understanding that others can have diverse desires from one's own plays a vital role in children's development of theory of mind.Previous studies have uncovered that such understanding of diverse desires develops continually since late infancy until the age of 7-8,and that the most significant improvement usually takes place at around age 4.Explanations for the development of diverse-desire reasoning come from the most popular theories(theory-theory,modulation theory,simulation theory)which mainly concern the development of theory of mind;nevertheless,the contribution of participation in social interaction is largely ignored.The importance of social interaction in cognitive development was first emphasized in Vygotsky's theories.Several theories have been raised based on his idea,claiming that social interaction plays a constructive role in the development of theory of mind and other cognitive abilities.These theories are thus referred to as a constructivist point of view in the present study.According to this view,the development of theory of mind is shaped within the structures of the social interaction.However,up to now we still have no idea if different types of social interaction affect the development of diverse-desire reasoning differently,and what the key structural difference between these social interactions are,which are going to be investigated in the present study.The present study focused on two typical types of social interaction,cooperation and competition,to systematically find out their effects on 4-year-old children's reasoning about diverse desires.Subjects were tested of their reasoning about diverse desires in a gift selection condition after playing a short period of social interactive game with an adult.The whole study consisted of two parts:the first part(Experiment 1 to Experiment 3)examined the different effects of cooperation and competition on children's reasoning about diverse desires,and the second part(Experiment 4 and Experiment 5)separated the effects of two structural difference between the two types of social interaction,goal type and coordination.Results mainly showed that:(1)Different types of social interaction have different effects on 4-year-old children's reasoning about diverse desires.Cooperation,but not competition,improved children's desire reasoning;(2)The null effect of competitive group could not be interpreted as a lower level of motivation to satisfy an opponent;(3)Cooperation improved children's ability to reason about diverse desires in a general way;(4)It is coordination between individuals,rather than goal type,that decided the effect of the social interaction.In sum,our results suggested that coordinating with others during social interaction helps children with reasoning about diverse desires.It supported and expanded the constructivist view of social development,and gave us rich implications on future research and educational practicing.