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Child Development.
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You Catch It
Susan R. Leekam
University of Kent at Canterbury
R. Theoryof Mind Is Contagious: You Catch It
SUSAN
PERNER,
TED;and LEEKAM,
JOSEF;RUFFMAN,
1994, 65, 1228-1238. This study investigated the relation
from Your Sibs. CHILDDEVELOPMENT,
between family size and "theory of mind." Results from an experiment with 3- and 4-year-olds
showed that children from larger families were better able than children from smaller families
to predict a story character'smistaken (false-belief based) action. Results from a second experiment on children with exactly 1 sibling failed to show any superiority of older over younger
siblings in promoting earlier understanding of belief. The data are interpreted as suggesting
that sibling interaction provides a rich "database" for building a theory of mind, and this is discussed in relation to other studies showing that particularkinds of interaction between sibling and child, or caregiver and child, have a beneficial effect on the understanding of false
belief.
Requests for reprints should be directed to the first authorat the following address: Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, England.
1994,65, 1228-1238.? 1994bytheSocietyforResearchin ChildDevelopment,Inc.
[ChildDevelopment,
All rightsreserved.0009-3920/94/6504-0003$01.00]
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1229
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1230
Child Development
same family had been tested. To avoid statis- Results and Discussion
tical problems of nonindependence one of
The dependent variable of main interest
the children in each case was dropped from is the proportion of children giving correct
the study at random. Of the remaining 76 answers to the belief question. The indepenchildren, 22 were only children, 42 came dent variables were age, sex, family size,
from a family of two children (18 had an memory questions (mean number of correct
older sibling, 23 a younger sibling, and one answers to the four questions), and origin of
had a twin), 11 came from a family of three belief (unexpected change vs. misinforma(four were second born, six were third born, tion stories). Table 1 shows the means, stanand one had an older sibling and a twin), dard deviations, and intercorrelations (df =
and one was the last of a family of four. The 74) for all independent variables (except the
number of siblings was not known to the ex- experimentally manipulated variable). The
effect of the independent variables was
perimenter when testing each child.
by logistic regression (BMDP LR,
Procedure and material.-Each child analyzed
Dixon et al., 1981) specifying the model
was told a false-belief story enacted with
*sex* family-size*memory-questions*bedolls in two model rooms. For half the chil- "age
where age, family size, and
dren it was an Unexpected Change story as lief-origin,"
were specified as interval
memory-question
introduced by Wimmer and Perner (1983) variables. Terms were introduced
according
about Max who helps his mother unpack the to the
following considerations. Using the
shopping bag. In the story, Max puts the hierarchical rule, interaction effects were
chocolate into a particular cupboard and considered
only after all component effects
goes to play. In his absence his mother were already in the model. The constant
needs some of the chocolate and then puts term of the
was in the
it into a different cupboard. In the meantime model at theregression equation
Since the theoretibeginning.
Max gets hungry on the playground and
interesting factors could be partly conwants some chocolate. Children are asked cally
founded with age, which has a known effect
two test questions, one about Max's knowl- on belief
understanding, we first introduced
edge about the chocolate's location (Knowl- age into the model and then checked which
edge Question), "Does Max know where the of the other effects if added to the model
chocolate is or does he not know where it would reduce the error variance
by a sigis?" and then one about Max's belief-based nificant amount. The effect of
was sigage
will
Max
action (Belief Question), "Where
N = 76) = 11.14, p < .001.
nificant,
X2(1,
look for the chocolate?"
After age had been introduced into the
Each subject's answer to the belief model the only other significant effect was
question was immediately followed by a se- family size, X2(N = 76) = 3.99, p < .05.
ries of Memory Questions assessing his or
The two significant main effects reflect
her understanding of the basic story facts:
an increase in the proportion of children
who gave correct answers to the belief ques1. Is it in there?(If no, Whereis it?)
2. Rememberat the beginning,where did tion with age and with family size. Figure 1
shows these increases (in rough approximaMaxput the chocolate?
3. Rememberwhen mothermoved the choco- tion for the age effect by grouping children
late?Wheredid she put it?
into two age groups). Also included are plots
4. Did Maxsee her put it there?
of false belief performancepredicted by the
regression equations for age and size.
For the other half of the children, the story
The magnitude of the improvement
involved Misinformation. On the playwith
family size is quite impressive, considhis
brother
Max
is
Sam,
joined by
ground
who asks him where the chocolate is. Max ering that its magnitude almost matches the
tells him what he mistakenly thinks, namely, improvement with age from young 3- to
that it is where he put it. Children are then older 4-year-olds. In other words, the benefit
asked the same test questions, but about children get from interacting with two sibSam ratherthan Max,and the MemoryQues- lings rather than none is worth about as
tion 2 is changed to: "Remember when Max much as 1 year of experience, which at this
talked to Sam on the playground?Where did young age is considerable, namely, onefourth of the young child's entire life.
Max say that the chocolate was?"
Further detail about materials and the
To investigate further the role of sibverbatim version of the stories can be found lings, we asked whether it makes any difference whether the siblings are older or
in Perner and Wimmer (1988).
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1231
TABLE 1
MEANS,
BETWEEN
PREDICTOR
CORRELATION WITH
VARIABLES
VARIABLE
Age ....................................
Sex .....................................
Family size .......................
Control question ..............
NOTE.-N
RANGE MEAN SD
3.1-4.7
1-2
1-4
0-4
3.9
.47
1.42
1.88
3.60
.50
.69
.73
Age
...
- .07
.06
.54
Sex
- .07
...
-.06
-.06
Family Size
.06
-.06
.08
= 76.
p > .30.
100
80
60
DataFrom
cM
o
Regression
040
0-
Raw Data
20
3
n=38
4
n=38
Age Group
0
n=22
1
n=42
2-3
n=12
Numberof Siblings
FIG. 1.-Percent children giving correct answer to the belief question in Experiment 1, according
to age and family size. Three-year-olds:mean = 3-6; 4-year-olds:mean = 4-4; regression equation for
age: Y = 1.78x - 6.66; regression equation for size: Y = .74x - 1.11.
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1232
Child Development
Experiment 2
Several possibilities come to mind concerning why siblings may have a beneficial
effect on children's development of a theory
of mind, which all relate to the age difference between child and sibling. One possibility is that siblings teach, or pass on in
some other way, relevant knowledge. In this
case we would expect that older siblings
should have a much more pronounced effect
than younger siblings. As mentioned before,
Light's (1979) findings support this expecta- mean age of 41/2years (SD = 31/2years). The
tion, and there was some indication of a possibling was an extreme outlier,
sible difference in the results of our first 419-year-old
SDs away from the mean. This sibling was
experiment, although not a statistically sig- also very distant in age from the next oldest
nificant one.
sibling of 11 years (1.8 SDs away from the
A second possibility is that siblings pro- mean). Since such outliers can exert undue
vide an opportunity for a child to sharpen influence on the statistical analysis we
his or her understandingby teaching the sib- dropped the child with the oldest sibling
lings. In fact, this possibility has been used from our sample. The ages of the remaining
by Zajonc and Markus(1975) to explain why 23 girls and 19 boys ranged from 3-2 to 5-9
the IQ of last borns has been found to be (mean 4-10); 15 of them had older and 27
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1233
checked whether there was a difference between children with an older and those with
a younger sibling, but there was no difference apparent: 10 of the 15 (two-thirds)children with older siblings and 18 of the 27
(two-thirds) children with younger siblings
passed false belief.
These results confirm the negative finding in the previous experiment that the age
of a child's sibling does not seem to matter.
The present results, furthermore, suggest
that closeness in age between sibling and
child does not matter much either (at least
not within a range of about 7 years).
General Discussion
The main finding of these experiments
is that the number of siblings in a family is
related positively to young children's rea-
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1234
Child Development
TABLE 2
BETWEEN PREDICTOR
MEANS, STANDARD DEVIATIONS, AND INTERCORRELATIONS
VARIABLESIN EXPERIMENT2
CORRELATION WITH
VARIABLES
VARIABLE
RANGE MEAN SD
4.8
1.55
4.11
2.72
.72
.50
2.89
1.10
Age
Sex
Sibling's
Age
...
.05
.05
.14
.08
...
.14
.14
.14
.18
.28
NOTE.-N = 42. Ages are being expressed in years, correctto the firstdecimal place.
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1235
cently applied to theory of mind experiments (Lewis & Osborne, 1990; Siegal &
Beattie, 1991). The criticism was that Piagetian tests do not accurately assess what
they purportto assess, namely, the development of certain concepts. Rather,they assess
young children's growing sensitivity to communicative intentions in their interaction
with an adult experimenter asking strange
questions.
To assimilate our findings the sociolinguistic criticism theorists need to explain
why increased interaction with siblings
helps children to better understand adults'
communicative intentions. If this challenge
can be met the interesting prediction follows
that family size should affect performanceon
various Piagetian tasks (e.g., conservation
tasks), to which the sociolinguistic criticism
has been applied, in a similar way to that
in which it affects performance on the false
belief task.
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1236
Child Development
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1237
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Child Development
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