Chung Amy M, Kim Terryn, Friedman Ori, Denison Stephanie
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Dev Sci. 2025 Jan;28(1):e13598. doi: 10.1111/desc.13598.
Some outcomes are brought about by intentional agents with access to information and others are not. Children use a variety of cues to infer the causes of outcomes, such as statistical reasoning (e.g., the probability of the outcome) and theory of mind (e.g., a person's perceptual access, preferences, or knowledge). Here we show that children use these cues to infer cheating, a finding which informs our understanding of the flexibility of children's theory of mind. In four experiments (N = 444), 4- to 7-year-olds saw vignettes about blindfolded agents retrieving 10 gumballs from a distribution of yummy and yucky gumballs. Children were then asked if agents were really blindfolded or had peeked. We manipulated the probability of the outcome (i.e., the correspondence between the distribution sampled from and the outcome produced) and the ordering of the outcome was patterned (e.g., five yummy then five yucky) or haphazard. From age 5, children began to use both cues to infer cheating, and also showed signs of flexibly integrating these cues. Together, these findings show that young children can detect cheaters, and that their theory of mind reasoning is flexible and not based on simple and rigid rules (e.g., equating not-seeing with failure). The findings also suggest that children use probabilistic reasoning to infer knowledge.
有些结果是由能够获取信息的有意行为者导致的，而有些则不是。儿童会使用各种线索来推断结果的原因，比如统计推理（例如结果的概率）和心理理论（例如一个人的感知、偏好或知识）。在此我们表明，儿童会利用这些线索来推断作弊行为，这一发现有助于我们理解儿童心理理论的灵活性。在四项实验（N = 444）中，4至7岁的儿童观看了关于被蒙住眼睛的行为者从一堆美味和难吃的口香糖中取出10颗口香糖的短剧。然后，孩子们被问到这些行为者是真的被蒙住了眼睛还是偷看了。我们操纵了结果的概率（即从抽样分布中抽取的样本与产生的结果之间的对应关系），并且结果的顺序是有规律的（例如五颗美味的然后五颗难吃的）或随机的。从5岁起，孩子们开始利用这两种线索来推断作弊行为，并且还表现出灵活整合这些线索的迹象。总之，这些发现表明幼儿能够察觉作弊者，并且他们的心理理论推理是灵活的，并非基于简单和僵化的规则（例如将看不见等同于失败）。这些发现还表明，儿童会使用概率推理来推断知识。
