Perspective-taking in early adolescent persuasion and its relationship to 'mentalising'

A discrepancy exits between young children's ability to select belief-relevant arguments during structured persuasion tasks and adolescents' failure to take another's perspective during spontaneous persuasion tasks. The current study examined this discrepancy by giving 34 adolescents four types of tasks: structured belief-relevant persuasion, open-ended spontaneous persuasion, mentalising, and vocabulary. Results revealed that conceptual role-taking, as measured by the mentalising type task, was correlated with performances on the open-ended spontaneous persuasion task even after controlling for vocabulary.