Clarifying the relationship between socioeconomic status and early psychological reasoning

University Of California - Merced, Merced CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate the impact of economic inequality on children's psychological reasoning -- specifically false-belief understanding, children's ability to reason about other people's behavior by considering their underlying mental states. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds lag far behind their more advantaged peers in an essential component of psychological reasoning, false-belief understanding. This is troubling because psychological reasoning is vital for navigating everyday life, and deficits in this skill could have serious negative consequences for the intellectual, social, and moral development of disadvantaged children, as well as their long-term well-being. This project will substantially advance understanding of how and why economic inequality influences children's psychological reasoning. This project thus has significant potential to understand perspective taking processes in children, as well as to improve the developmental outcomes of disadvantaged children. The findings could inform interventions designed to enhance psychological reasoning skills. Although there is considerable evidence for an economic disparity in false-belief understanding, the nature of this disparity is unclear because prior studies have used a single type of paradigm that children could fail for many reasons. To address this issue, a sample of socioeconomically diverse preschool children will complete multiple types of false-belief paradigms that target different facets of false-belief understanding, including several novel paradigms that have not previously been used to examine this disparity. Patterns of associations between socioeconomic status and task performance will be used to characterize the underlying nature of the socioeconomic disparity in false-belief understanding. Few studies have examined the mechanism by which socioeconomic status affects false-belief understanding, and thus little is known about the cause of this disparity. This project will test the hypothesis that this disparity arises via socioeconomic effects on parent-child interactions. Specifically, the researchers predict that less stressed and more knowledgeable parents will use more terms that refer to mental states such as "think" and "know". Parents' language use will be assessed during several interactive activities with their child. Structural equation modeling will be used to evaluate the proposed pathways from socioeconomic status to false-belief understanding. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.