The Effect of Philosophy for Children Program on the Theory of Mind and Machiavellianism Beliefs

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of teaching philosophy for children on the theory of mind and Machiavellianism beliefs in elementary school students. The research design was quasi experimental and pre-test, post-test and control group. The statistical population of the research consisted of 90 subjects were selected and randomly assigned to two groups of 45 subjects in experimental and control group. The book "Stories for Thinking" by Robert Fisher was used to teach philosophy for children that was based on storytelling method. Subsequently, experimental group subjects were trained in philosophy for children for ten sessions. The data were collected using the theory of mind Questionnaire (Happe, 1994) and the Machiavellianism Beliefs Questionnaire (Christie and Geis, 1970). The results showed that the teaching of philosophy for children promoted the theory of mind and reduced the Machiavellianism beliefs in the experimental group subjects compared to the control group.