Theory of puppets?: A critique of the use of puppets as stimulus materials in psychological research with young children

Much research exploring young children's capacity to understand the actions of other people, either in terms of mental states such as beliefs and desires or in terms of deontic powers such as rights and responsibilities, uses puppets, toys, or fictional characters in stories or cartoons as stimulus materials. This is puzzling, since puppets, toys and cartoon characters have neither beliefs and desires nor rights and responsibilities. In this article we explore this practice and point out that the experimental task is being framed as pretense. This framing makes it difficult to interpret the results of such research, reduces its ecological validity, and reveals an odd relationship between the ethnopsychology that is studied and the scientific psychology that is employed. All this raises the concern that what this research actually discloses is young children's theory of puppets.

Automated summary

Many studies on young children's understanding of others' actions use puppets, toys, or fictional characters as stimuli, raising concerns about the ecological validity and the relationship between ethnopsychology and scientific psychology. This may ultimately reveal more about children's theory of puppets than their understanding of human behavior.