Children’s understanding of reasons to sabotage

Abstract

Scenarios of sabotage were used to investigate children's appreciation of desires as subjective attitudes. Fifty-one pre-schoolers showed high proficiency in inferring an action in a cooperative scenario where two agents had a common goal and intended to coordinate goal achievement. However, they were at chance in inferring an action in a competitive scenario where two agents had a conflict of values and one intended to sabotage the others’ goal achievement. Moreover, understanding of sabotage was correlated with false belief understanding after controlling for age, verbal ability, working memory, inhibitory control, and planning. This result suggests a symmetrical development of understanding beliefs and desires by means of subjective attitudes as predicted by Perner and Roessler’s teleological theory of action explanation. As soon as children are able to understand perspectives, they appreciate false beliefs as well as conflicting values as reasons for actions.