Thompson Bruce, Thornton Bill
Department of Psychology, University of Southern Maine, 96 Falmouth Street, Science Building, Portland, ME 04104, USA.
J Soc Psychol. 2007 Apr;147(2):159-74. doi: 10.3200/SOCP.147.2.159-174.
The authors explored mental-state reasoning ability among 72 preschoolers (ages 3-5 years) as a possible developmental mechanism for the well-known social loafing effect: diminished individual effort in a collaborative task. The authors expected that older children would outperform young children on standard mental-state reasoning tests and that they would display greater social loafing than younger children. In addition, we hypothesized that the ability to infer the mental states of others would be predictive of social loafing, but that the ability to reason about one's own knowledge would not. The authors gave children three standard false-belief tasks and participated in a within-subjects balloon inflation task that they performed both individually and as part of a group. Results indicated that 3-year-olds performed significantly below older preschoolers on mental-state reasoning tasks. Only 4- and 5-year-olds displayed diminished individual effort. Multiple regression analysis indicated that only the ability to reason about others' false beliefs accounted for a significant amount of variance in social loafing; age (in months) and own false-belief reasoning did not. The authors discussed theoretical and pedagogical implications.
作者探究了72名学龄前儿童（3至5岁）的心理状态推理能力，将其作为著名的社会惰化效应（即在合作任务中个体努力减少）的一种可能的发展机制。作者预计，在标准心理状态推理测试中，年龄较大的儿童会比年龄较小的儿童表现更好，且他们会比年龄较小的儿童表现出更大程度的社会惰化。此外，我们假设推断他人心理状态的能力能够预测社会惰化，但推断自己知识的能力则不能。作者让儿童完成三项标准错误信念任务，并参与一项组内气球充气任务，该任务他们既要单独完成，也要作为小组的一部分来完成。结果表明，在心理状态推理任务上，3岁儿童的表现显著低于年龄较大的学龄前儿童。只有4岁和5岁的儿童表现出个体努力减少。多元回归分析表明，只有推断他人错误信念的能力在社会惰化方面解释了相当大比例的方差；年龄（以月为单位）和自己的错误信念推理则没有。作者讨论了理论和教学方面的意义。
