Children's understanding of ordinary and extraordinary minds.
How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental capacities. Results indicated that, in contrast to younger and older peers, children within a specific age range reliably attributed fallible, human-like capacities to ordinary humans and to several special agents (including God) for both tasks. These data lend critical support to an anthropomorphism hypothesis--which holds that children's understanding of extraordinary minds is derived from their everyday intuitive psychology--and reconcile disparities between the findings of other studies on children's understanding of extraordinary minds.
Lane
Jonathan D
JD
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. jonlane@umich.edu
Wellman
Henry M
HM
Evans
E Margaret
EM
D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D019359:Knowledge; D008297:Male; D010465:Perception; D012067:Religion