Sosyal bağlamda zihin kuramı: Kültür, sosyal ortam ve hedefteki kişinin özelliklerinin rolü

Theory-of-mind (ToM) describes the ability to understand mental states of others. According to the perspective of theory-theory, social context is critical for children's development and use of ToM ability as variety of experiences in social context provide children with rich input about diverse nature of others' mental states. In line with the perspective of theory-theory, the current dissertation with its three separate studies investigated the role of social context (e.g., broad cultural norms and family characteristics, general setting of the social interaction, and targets' characteristics) in development and use of ToM in children and young adults. The first study examined the developmental acquisition of ToM steps in Turkish children and explored whether this acquisition could be linked with socio-demographic factors of children's families. The results showed that majority of Turkish children in the sample displayed collectivist ToM acquisition pattern with earlier understanding of Knowledge Access (KA) than Diverse Beliefs (DB). However, further analyses focusing only on achievement in individual items of KA and DB revealed that those children who evidenced DB but not KA understanding were living in more crowded households with higher number of adults than children who evidenced KA but not DB. The findings implied that children's development of ToM takes places in line with the general norms of the society and in the context of Turkey where individualist and collectivist values co-exist, family characteristics play a critical role in determining whether children's ToM acquisition sequence would fit to individualist vs. collectivist pattern. The second study focused on the importance of children's ToM abilities in the context of peer play and tested test if acquisition of ToM transforms children's social interactions, particularly, their display of lower disruptive actions (e.g., opposition, rule breaking, yelling and aggressing) within play situation. This study also examined the role of emotion understanding and empathy as two critical socio-emotional skills associated with social behaviors of children. The findings demonstrated that not higher ToM or emotion understanding but higher empathy predicted lower disruptive behaviors of preschoolers in peer context. Although accurate interpretation of others' minds in ongoing social interactions can give rise to smooth peer relationship, in the context of peer play, ToM emerged as a general socio-cognitive ability (a cold comprehension skill) and high performance in ToM did not necessarily pave the way of more coordinated peer play behaviors. These results were in line with the claims stating that ToM is a cold comprehension skill (as opposed to empathy—affective sharing of others' emotions) which can be used either to harm or please others depending on individuals' motivation. Finally, the third study examined whether cultural characteristics of the target and associated social perceptions (e.g., perceived similarity, prejudice and threat perception) could influence accuracy of young adults' ToM performance. The results displayed that Turkish young adults performed higher mindreading accuracy toward Turkish targets than Syrian and Norwegian targets. Moreover, analyses conducted within each target group revealed complex interactions between perceived similarity, realistic threat and prejudice, documenting that both target characteristics and perceptions about these targets impact understanding minds of outgroup members. Overall, in line with the theory-theory's contention, these three studies showed that although humans are endowed with the capacity to make sense of others' subjective minds, their social experiences are critical in guiding development and later utilization of this capacity in childhood and early adulthood years.