Psychological And Sociomoral Reasoning In Infancy

AY2015/2016 Semester 1

This course provides undergraduate students with an advanced introduction to empirical findings, methods, and theoretical perspectives from the field of social cognition. In the first half of the course, students will learn about young children?s psychological reasoning. Topics will include how infants make sense of intentional actions of an agent in a scene, by specifying the agent?s mental states such as informational states (e.g., knowledge, ignorance, false beliefs), and motivational states (e.g., intention, desire, goal, disposition), and how infants identify agents. Review of early psychological reasoning sets the stage for learning about early socio-moral reasoning in the second half of the course, where students will learn about how young children reason about the interactions between two or more agents. Topics will include sociomoral expectations that apply to all individuals (fairness, no-harm), expectations that apply to individuals from the same social group (ingroup support and loyalty, authority), and expectations that depend on individuals? prior interactions (reciprocity). In the second half of the course, students will conduct a literature review and write a research proposal. Students will get feedback on the proposal and so that they might refine it for submission at the end of the semester. Students will also be evaluated on their critical analyses of two journal articles per week in the form of weekly reaction papers.