Structural Components and Intellectual Correlates of Cognitive Perspective Taking in First- Through Fourth-Grade Children

Abstract

KURDEK, LAWRENCE A. Structural Components and Intellectual Correlates of Cognitive Perspective Taking in Firstthrough Fourth-Grade Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1503-1511. Cognitive perspective taking, the ability to infer another person's cognitions, was assessed in 96 firstthrough fourth-grade children by 4 of the most widely used cognitive perspective-taking tasks: Feffer's RTT, Selman's social-moral dilemmas, Chandler's bystander cartoons, and a variation of Flavell et al.'s nickel-dime game. Task performance significantly increased with increasing grade level, and sex differences were nonsignificant. Results from both a consideration of task difficulty and a principal components analysis indicated that the 4 tasks were best viewed as 2 pairs of tasks: (a) RTT and dilemma, and (b) cartoon and nickel-dime variation; it is argued that only in the latter task pair can one be fairly certain that the child is coordinating his own and another person's perspective in the process of inferring another person's psychological status.