Social Understanding at the End of the First Year of Life

Abstract

Social behaviors, such as joint attention, social referencing, and protocommunicative acts, which emerge toward the end of the first year of life, have commonly been taken as evidence of considerable social understanding, even an "implicit" theory of mind. We identify the theoretical assumptions that this "commonsense view" entails and argue against this view of these behaviors by suggesting that the phenomena are entirely compatible with an account which does not attribute to the infant an understanding that others have psychological relations to objects or that self and others are equivalent in their potential for such psychological relations. We end by arguing that the account we propose potentially provides a developmental solution to the problem of how the child develops a theory of mind that is equally applicable to self and other without postulating the existence of considerable innate knowledge.