False belief understanding goes to school: On the social-emotional consequences of coming early or late to a first theory of mind

Abstract This research report describes a search for possible relations between children's developing theories of mind and aspects of their social-emotional maturity conducted by comparing the performance of 3-year-olds on measures of false belief understanding with teacher ratings of certain of their social-emotional skills and behaviours. The intuitions guiding this exploratory effort were, not only that a working grasp of the possibility of false belief would prove broadly predictive of social-emotional maturity, but also that such associations would be missing in the specific case of those preschool behaviours largely governed by a simple mastery of social conventions. As a step toward evaluating these possibilities a group of 40 preschoolers were given a battery of six measures of false belief understanding. The preschool teachers of these same children then completed a 40-item questionnaire covering a wide variety of markers of social-emotional maturity. Half of these items (termed “Intentional”) featured behaviours and skills thought to require some measure of insight into the mental lives of others, whereas the remainder (termed “Conventional”) were meant to sample a less heady domain of abilities open to those with no more than a simple grasp of social conventions, or the exercise of self-control. Consistent with the view that individual differences in children's early false belief understanding would express themselves primarily in those areas least governed by heavily routinised social conventions, our own summary measure of false belief understanding correlated positively only with those behavioural items classified as “Intentional”.