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Exploring Mental State Reasoning As A Social-Cognitive Mechanism For Social Loafing In Children., Robert Thompson, Bill Thornton

Bill Thornton

The authors explored mental-state reasoning ability among 72 preschoolers (ages 3-5 years) as a possible developmental mechanism for the well-known social loafing effect: diminished individual effort in a collaborative task. The authors expected that older children would outperform young children on standard mental-state reasoning tests and that they would display greater social loafing than younger children.