Abstract: A traditional Chinese children's story, "The Master and the Wolf",was used to create stimulus material to examine social perspective takingin Chinese and Australian children. The children were 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8years of age, with 30 in each age group. The results showed that though the subjects came from different soc-ial and cultural background, the order of acquisition of the concepts wassimilar in each culture: 1. Asimple elemantary perspective taking was first developed in pre-schoolers. For instance,they could take another person's visualperspectiveinto account, they could differentiate their own view from the other's,or one person's from the third person's, but they did not know that theproperties of thought had to do with the recursive nature potentiallyuntil they reached middle childhood. 2. For evaluating personalities in the characters of the story,the pre-schoolers first developed a general global stereotyped idea in terms ofthe circumstances and extrinsic behavior of characters. They could notmention the personality traits until the age of 7 or 8. 3. There were no significent differences between male and femalesubjects in both countries for the above acquisition. However, the levels of acquisition in Australian children was delay-ed at least one to two years compared with Chinese children. This diver-gence might partly be attributed to the effects of different social environ-ment they live in and the material conteat they are familiar with.

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