University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Dev Sci. 2020 Sep;23(5):e12951. doi: 10.1111/desc.12951. Epub 2020 Mar 3.
Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal-directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but can diverge when the optimal behavioural policy changes without being directly reinforced (thus specifically hobbling the habitual learning strategy). Unlike the flexibility of goal-directed behaviour, rigid habits can cause agents to persist in behaviour that is no longer adaptive. In the current study, all children predict agents will tend to behave consistently with their goals, but between the ages of 5 and 10, children showed an increasing understanding of how habits can cause agents to persistently take suboptimal actions. These findings stand out from the typical way the development of social reasoning is examined, which instead focuses on children's increasing appreciation of how others' beliefs or expectations affect how they will act in service of their goals. The current findings show that children also learn that under certain circumstances, people's actions are suboptimal despite potentially 'knowing better.'
理论心理（ToM）的发展研究表明，儿童在很小的时候就可以推断出他人的目标。然而，人类的行为有时不是由实现目标的计划驱动的，而是由习惯驱动的，习惯是在长期的强化中形成的。习惯性和目标导向性的行为通常是一致的，但当最优行为策略发生变化而没有得到直接强化时，它们就会出现分歧（从而专门削弱习惯性学习策略）。与目标导向行为的灵活性不同，僵化的习惯会导致代理人坚持不再适应的行为。在当前的研究中，所有的孩子都预测代理人会倾向于按照自己的目标行事，但在 5 到 10 岁之间，孩子们越来越理解习惯是如何导致代理人持续采取次优行为的。这些发现与通常检查社会推理发展的方式不同，通常的方式是关注儿童越来越意识到他人的信念或期望如何影响他们为实现目标而采取的行动。当前的发现表明，儿童也了解到，在某些情况下，尽管人们可能“明知故犯”，但他们的行为仍不是最优的。
