False Beliefs

Our reading from this Wednesday discussed theory of mind which is achieved by the age of 3 or 4. One of the important aspects of theory of mind is being able to understand intensions and actions of others and yourself, this is called false beliefs. Children can be tested if they are capable of false beliefs through a test called “misleading appearance” task. Children are lead to believe there is candy in a box but once they look in the box there are pencils inside. Five year olds say they expected there to be candy inside and believe that if other children looked in the box they would think there would be candy in the box also. Three year olds on the other hand say they always knew there were pencils inside and they believe that other children would know there would be pencils also. Another task that test false belief is “location change” task. The results are the same between five and three year olds.
In my Social Psychology class we talked about false beliefs and how adults still struggle with false belief tasks. One article I read, by Susan Birch and Paul Bloom, talked about the curse of knowledge can conflict with an adults reasoning of false beliefs. Birch and Bloom investigate if an adult has plausible knowledge of an event, is he or she capable of predicting another person’s false beliefs. The task was much similar to the way the test children’s false beliefs. Participants were randomly assigned to three different groups: ignorance, knowledge-plausible, or knowledge implausible. Participants were shown a picture of a girl holding a violin and standing by four containers. Each container was a different color: blue, purple, red, and green. The second picture they were shown was a different girl holding a violin and there were four of the same containers that were rearranged. Subjects were then told, ‘This is Vicki. She finishes playing her violin and puts it in the blue container. Then she goes outside to play. While Vicki is outside playing, her sister, Denise . . . .” Than they were told different things depending on which group they were in, “Ignorance: ‘‘moves the violin to another container.’’ Knowledge-plausible: ‘‘moves the violin to the red container.’’ Knowledge-implausible: ‘‘moves the violin to the purple container.’ The findings showed, that similar to children, an adult’s own knowledge makes it harder to reason others false beliefs and prediction of their actions, only when it is plausible knowledge. These finds concluded that one’s own knowledge can taint our abilities to reason what other people’s action and beliefs.
I get really excited when two of my classes discuss similar topics because you get different perspectives of the topic. False belief is a complex theory of the mind and the findings about adult’s capabilities on these tasks shed light on how children and adults social cognition isn’t much different.