Conceptual Perspective Taking in 2- to 6-Year-Old Children

TLDR: This article found that children as young as 3 years of age can correctly anticipate the other child's feelings in certain simple contexts, such as a person at a birthday party will be happy, since it is generally shared knowledge that anyone at a party is probably happy.

Abstract: The literature is unclear and controversial as to when children are first able to engage in conceptual perspective taking, that is, to infer another person's thoughts, feelings, or internal states of knowledge (e.g., Borke, 1971; Chandler & Greenspan, 1972). Most studies have found that children younger than 7 years of age are not able to engage in this activity. Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, and Jarvis ("apple-dog story," 1968) arid Chandler and Greenspan (1972) used tasks in which the child had access to information not available to the other person. The child was then required to make an inference about the other's restricted conceptual viewpoint. In both studies it was found that most children under 9 years of age were unable to engage in veridical perspective taking. Using stimuli containing less information and requiring responses with fewer linguistic demands, a few studies have purportedly found evidence of conceptual perspective taking in children as young as 3 or 4 years of age. Borke (1971) had children select a picture to match the affective state of a hypothetical child in a story. She found that children as young as 3 years of age can correctly anticipate the other child's feelings in certain simple contexts. Borke's study has been criticized on the grounds that her task may have been measuring some social skill other than perspective taking. A young child might accurately predict that a person at a birthday party will be happy. Since it is generally shared knowledge that anyone at a birthday party is probably happy, the child need not engage in perspective taking to correctly anticipate the other's feelings. To ensure that perspective taking is required for correct performance, the task must be constructed so that the child's perspective is demonstrably different from that of the other. As Chandler and Greenspan (1972) point out, "Without this important qualification, egocentric and nonegocentric thought result in the same outcome