Mindreading With Kindness: Recruiting Theory of Mind for Benevolent Social Orientation

Children's social information processing is known to be related to various behavioral and social outcomes, but most developmental research has traditionally focused on maladaptive processes, such as a defensive view of the social world, hostile attributions, negative interpretation of others’ actions, and aggressive responses, and their close associations with antisocial outcomes. By contrast, adaptive processes, such as a benevolent worldview, benign attributions, positive interpretations, and prosocial responses, and their childhood antecedents, remain relatively underexplored. The current longitudinal study investigated theory of mind (ToM) and prosocial moral values at preschool age as predictors of benevolent social orientation at school age. Specifically, we tested the interaction effects between ToM and prosocial moral values, assuming that ToM is a morally neutral tool that can be used either prosocially or antisocially. Participants included 200 low‐risk, typically developing children from the U.S. Midwest. At 4.5 years, ToM was measured using a series of false‐belief tasks, and prosocial moral values were assessed using hypothetical dilemmas. At 6.5 years, benevolent social orientation was measured using a set of vignettes depicting ambiguous situations. Results supported significant interactions: Higher ToM was associated with more benevolent social orientation for children with higher prosocial values and lower self‐interested values. These findings supported the view of ToM as morally neutral and highlighted the critical role of early internalization of moral values in guiding children to use their abilities of social understanding for a positive view toward the social world.