Young children's understanding of fact beliefs versus value beliefs.
Recent research on the development of children's knowledge about the mind has shown that young 3-year-olds have difficulty inferring that another person holds a false belief about a matter of verifiable fact, even when provided with considerable help. 4 studies tested the hypothesis that they would have less difficulty inferring that another person holds an odd, nonnormative belief about a matter of taste or value--one which, like the false fact belief, they themselves do not hold. On fact-belief tasks, an experimenter acted as if, or even explicitly stated that, she believed that the contents of a container were other than what the children knew to be the case. On value-belief tasks, she behaved as if she believed that a stimulus had a good or bad taste, smell, or appearance, whereas they thought it had the opposite. The results of all 4 studies confirmed the hypothesis.
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, CA 94305-2099.
J H
JH
Flavell
E R
ER
Flavell
F L
FL
Green
L J
LJ
Moses
D001288:Attention; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D008297:Male; D011936:Reality Testing; D012903:Smell; D012945:Social Values; D013649:Taste; D014796:Visual Perception