title: Understanding children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning.
abstract: Young children exhibit several deficits in reasoning about their own and other people's mental states. We propose that these deficits, along with more subtle limitations in adults' social-cognitive reasoning, are all manifestations of the same cognitive bias. This is the 'curse of knowledge' - a tendency to be biased by one's own knowledge when attempting to appreciate a more naïve or uninformed perspective. We suggest the developmental differences in mental state reasoning exist because the strength of this bias diminishes with age, not because of a conceptual change in how young children understand mental states. By pointing out the common denominator in children's and adults' limitations in mental state reasoning we hope to provide a unified framework for understanding the nature and development of social cognition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Yale University, PO Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA. susan.birch@yale.edu <susan.birch@yale.edu>
authors.forename: Susan A J
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Birch
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bloom
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception