Relatywizm myślenia młodzieży i młodych dorosłych jako przejaw rozwoju dojrzałej teorii umysłu

Relativism of adolescents’ and young adults’ thinking as the expression of the mature theory of mindUnderstanding the subjective nature of knowledge is the core of the relativism. The research conducted after Piaget (eg.: Perry, 1970; Chandler, 1987; Kuhn, 1998) revealed how children, adolescents and adults change their attitude to knowledge. On the other hand research on social cognition, especially on theory of mind (eg. Robinson i Apperly, 1998) find that the transition from childhood absolutism to relativism is not the effect of the insight in the nature of knowledge but it is rather the effect of broadening the set of psychological variables which should be taken into account when we think about the knowledge.In our research two kinds of dilemmas were presented to secondary school pupils and college students: medical dilemma and social dilemma. The groups of subjects were presented with dilemmas with more or less information about psychological situation of the main characters of dilemmas (their motivation, goals. The main aim of the research was the preliminary answer to the question about the possible relation between someone’s knowledge about the mind (ToM) and the ability to think in relativistic way.The results stands that searching to answer the question about when and why relativism appears and then decreases in adolescents’ and young adults’ thinking is still an open matter. Nevertheless it is worth to try to link the research on thinking with the research on social cognition, because presented results are inspired.