Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies

• Main Authors: Barrett, H. Clark, Broesch, Tanya, Scott, Rose M., He, Zijing, Baillargeon, Renée, Wu, Di, Bolz, Matthias, Henrich, Joseph, Setoh, Peipei, Wang, Jianxin, Laurence, Stephen
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Sociology::Societies
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/107315; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/25367
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.