Michael J. Chandler

Cultural Continuity as a Hedge against Suicide in Canada's First Nations:

This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults - who are living through moments of especially dramatic change - constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbias nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which British Columbias 196 bands are engaged in community practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.

Small-Scale Deceit: Deception as a Marker of Two-, Three-, and Four-Year-Olds' Early Theories of Mind.

This research report summarizes the results of a study into the abilities of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children to deceptively lead others into false beliefs, and is intended to help arbitrate a growing controversy as to when young persons first acquire some theory-like understanding of other minds. Utilizing a novel hide-and-seek board game as a context within which to observe childrens spontaneous use of deceptive strategies, a total of 50 subjects between the ages of 2 1/2 and 5 were tested. In contrast to the competing findings of others, which are claimed to establish that children younger than approximately 4 suffer a cognitive deficit that wholly blocks them from the possibility of entertaining any sort of contrastive beliefs about beliefs, the results of this study show that even 2 1/2-year-olds are capable of already successfully employing a range of deceptive strategies that both trade upon an awareness of the possibility of false beliefs and presuppose some already operative theory of mind.

False belief understanding goes to school: On the social-emotional consequences of coming early or late to a first theory of mind

Abstract This research report describes a search for possible relations between childrens developing theories of mind and aspects of their social-emotional maturity conducted by comparing the performance of 3-year-olds on measures of false belief understanding with teacher ratings of certain of their social-emotional skills and behaviours. The intuitions guiding this exploratory effort were, not only that a working grasp of the possibility of false belief would prove broadly predictive of social-emotional maturity, but also that such associations would be missing in the specific case of those preschool behaviours largely governed by a simple mastery of social conventions. As a step toward evaluating these possibilities a group of 40 preschoolers were given a battery of six measures of false belief understanding. The preschool teachers of these same children then completed a 40-item questionnaire covering a wide variety of markers of social-emotional maturity. Half of these items (termed “Intentional”) fe...

Relativism and Stations of Epistemic Doubt.

This sequence of studies examined the role that relativistic thinking plays in the cognitive and social-emotional lives of adolescents. Study 1 introduces an assessment strategy and associated descriptive model employed in evaluating how 70 concrete and formal operational adolescents differently interpret and resolve problems involving competing knowledge claims. A second study explored the relations between the epistemic orientations evidenced by 61 of these subjects and their current level of identity development. Study 3 compared the epistemic assumptions of a group of 29 psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents with those of a matched group of normal controls. Results from these studies indicate that relativistic approaches to problems of belief entitlement are: a) routinely characteristic of most normal adolescents; b) available to formal operational, but not concrete operational individuals; c) associated with more mature ego-identity statuses; and d) typically absent in groups of psychiatrically hospitalized youth.

Developmental Changes in the Contribution of Shared Experience to Social Role-Taking Competence.

The contribution of shared experience to the social role-taking competence of 120 preschool, second- and fifth-grade children was evaluated under experimental conditions which did or did not provide subjects the opportunity to previously occupy the perspective of those whose points of view they were later required to assume. It was demonstrated that the youngest subjects regularly failed in their role-taking efforts with or without such backgrounds of shared experience, that the 11-year-olds succeeded in either case, and that the success of the 7-year-olds was a direct function of whether or not they shared common background experiences with those whose roles they attempted to assume. These results indicate that social role-taking competence in early and middle childhood is a joint function of both cognitive ability level and the actual degree of overlap which exists between the experiences of subjects and their role-taking partners.

Children's understanding of interpretation

The prevailing view in the study of childrens developing theories of mind is that the 4-year-olds newfound understanding of false belief is the single developmental milestone marking entry into an adult “folk psychology.” We argue instead that there are at least two such watershed events. Children first develop a “copy theory” that equates the mind with a recording device capable of producing either faithful or flawed representations of reality and according to which mental states are determined entirely by the flow of information into the mind. Only later, in the early school years, do children come to appreciate, as do adults, that the mind itself can contribute to the content of mental states. This later-arriving “Interpretive Theory of Mind” allows an appreciation of the capacity for constructively interpreting and misinterpreting reality. The main finding from the six studies reported here is that children who otherwise demonstrate a clear understanding that beliefs can be false (and so deserve to be credited with a theory of mind), can nevertheless fail to appreciate even the most basic aspects of interpretation: that despite exposure to precisely the same information, two persons can still end up holding sharply different opinions about what is the self-same reality. What these studies reveal is that an interpretive theory of mind is different from, and later arriving than, an appreciation of the possibility of false belief, and contrary to competing claims, this interpretive theory actually makes its first appearance during, but not before, the early school years.

Psychopathy and moral development: A comparative study of delinquent and nondelinquent youth

Sixty male adjudicated juvenile delinquents between the ages 14–17, and 20 nondelinquent controls were administered measures of moral reasoning, social convention understanding, interpersonal awareness, socialization, empathy, autonomy, and psychopathy in an effort to explore the relations between moral reasoning, moral sentiment, and antisocial behavior. Not only did the delinquent group evidence developmental delays on all of these direct and indirect tests of morality functioning, but their performance on certain of these measures also differentiated those offenders who were more or less psychopathic. By demonstrating the special contribution of measures of moral will or sentiment to the study of antisocial behavior, these findings serve to underscore the multidimensional character of moral development, and the complexity of the relations between thought and action.

The Othello Effect

The purpose of this essay is to explicate a developmental course along which young persons commonly are led to question their own standards of belief entitlement. Utilizing as a source model a counter

Changing selves in changing worlds: youth suicide on the fault-lines of colliding cultures

What does it mean to somehow override change and to count ones self as one and the same individual, continuous in time? What does “continuity” mean for whole cultural groups? How might disruptions to a sense of personal or cultural persistence deprive us of a past, and a connection to our as yet unrealized futures? Why is it that the bulk of us who succeed in knitting up our raveled sleeves of care choose for life, while those who loosed the thread of their continuous existence so frequently make the opposite choice? The program of research outlined here—work that explores the relation between markers of self- and cultural continuity, and suicidal behaviors in both culturally mainstream and Canadian Aboriginal youth—provides evidence that personal persistence and persistent peoples have low or absent rates of youth suicide, while individuals and communities lacking a requisite sense of continuity regularly suffer suicides in epidemic numbers.

Surviving Time: The Persistence of Identity in This Culture and That

This account is all about how young persons of different cultural stripes work to keep their identities in good repair. Rank-and-file Euro-American adolescents are shown to be steeped in a standard brew of essentialist thought. By contrast, ‘First Nations’ youth commonly adopt a more narrative approach to the problem by weaving together the various threads of their lives into some culturally available fabric. Beyond exploring the relation between the breakdown of such diverse self-warranting practices and youth suicide, the present essay works to bring out possible parallels between such alternative conceptions of personal persistence and various accounts of selfhood and timeconsciousness evident in the course of recent intellectual history.