Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 280, Issue 1755, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2654
Keywords
theory of mind; evolutionary psychology; false-belief understanding; social cognition; human universals
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Funding
- UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Sheffield
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31200763]
- AHRC [119413/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Arts and Humanities Research Council [119413/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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The psychological capacity to recognize that others may hold and act on false beliefs has been proposed to reflect an evolved, species-typical adaptation for social reasoning in humans; however, controversy surrounds the developmental timing and universality of this trait. Cross-cultural studies using elicited-response tasks indicate that the age at which children begin to understand false beliefs ranges from 4 to 7 years across societies, whereas studies using spontaneous-response tasks with Western children indicate that false-belief understanding emerges much earlier, consistent with the hypothesis that false-belief understanding is a psychological adaptation that is universally present in early childhood. To evaluate this hypothesis, we used three spontaneous-response tasks that have revealed early false-belief understanding in the West to test young children in three traditional, non-Western societies: Salar (China), Shuar/Colono (Ecuador) and Yasawan (Fiji). Results were comparable with those from the West, supporting the hypothesis that false-belief understanding reflects an adaptation that is universally present early in development.
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