Abstract
A traditional Chinese children's story, "The Master and the Wolf", was used to create stimulus material to examine social perspective taking in Chinese and Australian children. The children were 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 years of age, with 30 in each age group.The results showed that though the subjects came from different social and cultural background, the order of acquisition of the concepts was similar in each culture:
- A simple elementary perspective taking was first developed in preschoolrs. For instance, they could take another person's visualperspective into account, they could differentiate their own view from the other's, or one person's from the third person's, but they did not know that the properties of thought had to do with the recursive nature potentially until they reached middle childhood.
- For evaluating personalities in the characters of the story, the pre-schoolers first developed a general global stereotyped idea in terms of the circumstances and extrinsic behavior of characters. They could not mention the personality traits until the age of 7 or 8 .
- There were no significant differences between male tnd female subjects in both countries for the above acquisition.
However, the levels of acquisition in Australian children was delayed at least one to two years compared with Chinese children. This divergence might partly be attributed to the effects of different social environment they live in and the material content they are familiar with.
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