Development Of Children's Folk Economic Understanding And Its Relationship To Theory Of Mind

The naive theory approach is an effective theoretical framework for studying children's conceptual development. According to this approach, children's knowledge is divided by domains, and children are able to construct a folk theory from their experience of a certain domain and use it to explain or predict phenomena in this domain. Extant researches demonstrated that the naive theory approach was advantageous in the explanation and prediction of development of children's economic understanding. Recent studies also suggested that theory of mind (ToM) might contribute to the development of economic understanding. It is, therefore, conducive to tap on "how specific the economic domain is" through probing into the relationship between children's economic understanding and ToM.This study focused on two issues: one was the developmental trends of children's folk understanding of economics; the other was how specific the economic domain was. To address these questions, 130 children participants were recruited from kindergarten, grade one and grade two, and one-to-one interviews were administered to them. Specifically, the aspects of children's understanding investigated and the research findings were as follows:1. As to the first question, children's economic relationship understanding and economic conceptual understanding were assessed. The formal, including causal relationships among demand, sales, supply and price, was investigated by economic relationship tasks, revisited from Thompson and Siegler(2000)'s "lemonade juice story". The later, including acquisition of desired goods, economizing, profit seeking, competition and perception on quality of goods, was investigated by the formal economic relationship task and new economic concept task. The results showed that children's economic relationship understanding as well as economic conceptual understanding increased with age; there saw some developmental differences among economic relationships and among economic concepts, with price as a causal variable (economizing) learnt earliest; in economic relationship understanding task, children who cited appropriate concepts tend to make correct judgment of economic relationship, which suggested that children's reasoning of economic relationship was based on relevant economic concepts. 2. As to the second question, the relationship between children's economic understanding and ToM was examined. Children's understanding of second-order belief was evaluated by Sullivan, Zaitchik & Tager-Flusberg(1994)'s new storty. Children's economic relationship understanding with ToM cues was scrutinized by economic relationship tasks with ToM question inserted. Children's understanding of general ToM (no economic understanding needed) and economic ToM (economic understanding needed) were investigated by task of new ToM in economic context. The results, together with performance on economic relationship task and economic concept task, revealed that the developmental order of four concepts changed little across two economic-related tasks, which suggested the difficulties in understanding profit seeking might not owing to difficulty of second order belief; the majority of the economic concepts were found significantly correlated; in the same economic context, answering questions of economic ToM for children was more difficult than those of general ToM. The results eventually suggested that economic understanding mainly manifested its specificity in causal relationships and concepts examined in this study, moreover, relationship across concepts verified their coherence within the domain. However, the influence of ToM was not clear enough, which awaited further researches.