Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies.
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.
UCLA Department of Anthropology, 341 Haines Hall Box 951552, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. hclarkbarrett@gmail.com
H Clark
HC
Barrett
Tanya
T
Broesch
Rose M
RM
Scott
Zijing
Z
He
Renée
R
Baillargeon
Di
D
Wu
Matthias
M
Bolz
Joseph
J
Henrich
Peipei
P
Setoh
Jianxin
J
Wang
Stephen
S
Laurence
D000818:Animals; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002681:China; D032882:Comprehension; D003210:Concept Formation; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D004484:Ecuador; D005260:Female; D005367:Fiji; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D012424:Rural Population