Young children reason more adaptively about the future (e.g., predicting preferences and delaying gratification) when they are asked to think about another person’s perspective versus their own perspective. An explanation for this “other-over-self” advantage is that in contexts where current (e.g., small reward now) and future (e.g., larger reward later) desires conflict, adopting the perspective of another person provides psychological distance and hence more adaptive decision making by reducing conflict. We tested this hypothesis in 158 preschoolers using a battery of representative future-oriented reasoning tasks (Preferences, Delay of Gratification, Picture Book, and “Spoon”) in which we varied the perspective children adopted (self or other) and the level of conflict between current and future desires (high or low). We predicted that perspective and conflict would interact such that children would benefit most from taking the perspective of “other” when conflict was high. Although results did not support this hypothesis, we found significant effects of conflict; children reasoned more optimally on our low-conflict task condition than on our high-conflict task condition, and these differences did not appear to be related to inhibitory control. The effect of conflict was most marked in younger preschoolers, resulting in Age × Conflict interactions on two of our four tasks. An other-over-self advantage (i.e., perspective effect) was detected on the Preferences task only. These results add to the growing body of literature on children’s future thinking by showing the important role of conflict (and its interaction with age) in the accuracy with which children reason about the future.

当幼儿被要求考虑他人的观点与自己的观点时，他们对未来的推理能力更强（例如，预测偏好和延迟满足）。这种“超越自我”优势的一个解释是，在当前（例如，现在的小奖励）和未来（例如，以后的大奖励）的情况下) 渴望冲突，采用另一个人的观点可以提供心理距离，从而通过减少冲突来做出更具适应性的决策。我们使用一系列具有代表性的面向未来的推理任务（偏好、延迟满足、图画书和“勺子”）在 158 名学龄前儿童中测试了这一假设，在这些任务中，我们改变了儿童采用的视角（自我或他人）和冲突程度当前和未来的欲望（高或低）之间。我们预测观点和冲突会相互作用，这样当冲突严重时，儿童将从“他人”的观点中受益最大。虽然结果不支持这一假设，但我们发现了冲突的显着影响；儿童在我们的低冲突任务条件下比在我们的高冲突任务条件下推理得更好，这些差异似乎与抑制控制无关。冲突的影响在较年轻的学龄前儿童中最为显着，导致我们四项任务中的两项出现年龄×冲突交互。仅在 Preferences 任务中检测到了他者对自己的优势（即透视效应）。这些结果通过显示冲突（及其与年龄的相互作用）在儿童推理未来的准确性中的重要作用，为越来越多的关于儿童未来思维的文献增添了色彩。