title: Children's understanding of promising, lying, and false belief.
abstract: Understanding promising and lying requires an understanding of intention and the ability to interpret mental states. The author examined (a) the extent to which 4- to 6-year-olds focus on the sincerity of the speaker's intention when the 4-to 6-year-olds make judgments about promises and lies and (b) whether false-belief reasoning skills are related to understanding promising and lying. Participants watched videotaped stories and made promise and lie judgments from their own perspective and from the listener-character's perspective. Children also completed false-belief reasoning tasks. Older children made more correct promise judgments from both perspectives. All children made correct lie judgments from the listener's perspective. The author found that Ist-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the participant's perspective; 2nd-order false-belief reasoning was related to making judgments from the listener-character's perspective. Results suggest that children's understanding of promising and lying moves from a focus on outcome toward a focus on the belief that each utterance is designed to create.
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota, Department of Psychology, 328 Bohannon Hall, 1207 Ordean Court, Duluth, MN 55812, USA. fmaas@d.umn.edu
authors.forename: Fay K
authors.initials: FK
authors.lastname: Maas
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D003210:Concept Formation; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007600:Judgment; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D018187:Personal Construct Theory; D002666:Psychology, Child; D013067:Speech Perception; D014741:Video Recording