Certain aspects of children's social cognition ripple throughout their lives, including whether small children can understand that other people’s minds are different than their own.
That understanding plays a critical role in relationships, cooperation with other people and even in academic performance.
For the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have operated under the belief that children from low-income backgrounds are severely delayed in developing this skill.
Developmental psychology Professor Rose Scott, though, believes that is a false conclusion, and that the problem lies in the standardized tests that are used to discover such issues. Thanks to a large new grant from the National Science Foundation, she’ll get a chance to work with hundreds of families from the San Joaquin Valley to find out if her theory is correct.
“The awareness that other people’s minds are different from ours is an indicator of many different and important abilities,” said Scott, who’s with the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts and an affiliate of the Heath Sciences Research Institute, “and maybe I take the belief about low-income children a little personally because I come from a working-class background. But few studies have explored this finding further, and I have 10 years of research that shows that this particular test underestimates all kids.”
She believes other problems are not being considered when children fail the standardized test of false-belief understanding, such as whether they understand the language in the test or even that they are being tested.
She’ll collaborate with quantitative psychology Professor Sarah Depaoli, who will assist with the statistical analyses of the data Scott and her students collect.
