Understanding “Society” is More Than Summing up the Folks I Know: Individual Development of a Concept of Generalized Other Minds

The ability to consider other people's perspectives is an important competence in societies. The competence to extend this perspective to unknown individuals or even to abstracted, generalized people has been neglected in developmental research. For the latter aspect, we propose the term Concept of Generalized Other Minds (CoGOM). Two developmental models are conceivable: (a) a sequential model in which a CoGOM develops additively from increasing complexity in a person's Theory of Mind (ToM) and (b) a Y model with a diverging developmental pathway, starting from basic ToM competencies as a common root. In three studies are presented, in which several tasks measured five- to ten-year-old children's abilities to consider generalized others’ perspectives. ToM and perspective-taking were correlated across studies, but ToM and a linguistic indicator of CoGOM (pronoun) were not. These findings may offer preliminary evidence that the development of a CoGOM follows the Y model.