Abstract

RASGA, Célia; QUELHAS, Ana Cristina; COUTO, Marta  and  MARQUES, João. Teoria da mente e pensamento contrafactual em crianças de baixo nível socioeconómico. Aná. Psicológica [online]. 2015, vol.33, n.4, pp.467-479. ISSN 0870-8231.  https://doi.org/10.14417/ap.1186.

Our work aims to explore children’s comprehension of the reasons that others have for actions, that is, we explored this effect of the knowledge about the reasons for actions, during counterfactual and false beliefs reasoning, and extending it to children’s development. Previous work has shown that people tend to think differently about the actions when they have knowledge about the reasons behind those actions. An important step towards understanding the actions of others is reasoning about their intentions (Juhos, Quelhas, & Byrne, 2015; Walsh & Byrne, 2007). Children aged 6 and 8 years were tested with a new task: the change of intentions task, which included scenarios where an actor has an initial reason (desire or obligation) for an action, which is subsequently changed. Results showed that 6 year-olds make more mistakes in the false beliefs inferences than in the counterfactual inferences, once these children tend to focus more on the desires when they make false beliefs inferences. These results contribute to the open discussion about the relationship between counterfactual thinking and theory of mind, but it also brings some light on how children think the different reasons for the actions.

Keywords : Theory of mind; Counterfactual thinking; Intentions; Children.

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