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How children approach the false belief test: social development, pragmatics, and the assembly of Theory of Mind

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Abstract

Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false beliefs to others, despite demonstrating a basic comprehension of the concept of belief. Challenging this view, this article assumes a sociopragmatic perspective on language to argue that even children younger than four may not understand at all the concept of belief but may nevertheless master naïvely the pragmatics of belief reports in specific conversational contexts. The proposal suggests a novel interpretation of both the reasons behind younger children’s difficulty with (elicited-response) false belief tasks, and the critical factors enabling children’s success in them. On the one hand, it proposes that younger children fail (elicited-response) false belief tasks because they do not understand the importance of focusing on an agent’s (verbally ascribed) mental states to infer her practical commitments. On the other hand, it suggests that children’s active engagement in conversations where the caregiver credits an agent with a belief is the critical factor integrating their initially scattered mastery of the pragmatics of belief reports, teaches them to track belief reports across contexts, and accordingly shapes their understanding of belief as a representational mental state.

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Notes

  1. In what follows, I will usually confine the discussion to the location-change version of FBT as meta-analyses (Wellman et al. 2001) showed that children perform similarly in this and other tasks like the unexpected content FBT (Hogrefe et al. 1986), and the unexpected identity FBT (Gopnik and Astington 1988).

  2. Interestingly enough, cross-cultural studies have shown significant variation in the developmental trajectories for KAT, DBT, and FBT. While children from the United States and Australia first pass DBT and then KAT (Wellman and Liu 2004), Chinese and Iranian children reliably pass these two tasks in the reverse order (Shahaeian et al. 2011; Wellman et al. 2006, 2011). Although the reason for such a variation are still debated, it is sufficient for the present discussion that children reliably pass KAT and DBT earlier than FBT.

  3. Accordingly, Wellman and Liu (2004) write that children’s correct answering in KAT attests that they “understand ignorance (e.g., that … [Polly] does not know what is in a container)” (p. 529, my emphasis), and that passing DBT indicates that “children can judge that they and someone else can have differing beliefs about the same situation” (p. 536).

  4. In fact, I have argued more in detail in other works (Fenici 2015a; Fenici and Zawidzki 2016) that infants’ socio-cognitive abilities depend on a basic capacity to form expectations about the outcome of others’ actions. This capacity is a particular case of the general capacity to learn from observed events what is normal and habitual in their environment, and does not originally involve knowledge specific to the social domain. However, it improves progressively through learning in the first years of life facilitated by social interaction up to the point of tracking first what other agents can (and cannot) gaze at, and then what other agents did (and did not) gaze at in the past—and thus still believe in the present (see also Fenici 2016, 2017b; Fenici and Garofoli 2020 for critical discussion of competitive accounts).

  5. For the sake of simplicity, I will hereafter use ‘FBT’ to refer exclusively to elicited-response FBTs.

  6. See Budwig (2002) for another extremely significant report on the limited understanding of desires manifested by children’s earlier uses of want, and how it progresses through the interaction with the caregiver.

  7. This is particularly relevant in the process of solving disputes, where expressing uncertainty about the truth of a stated sentence may be relevant to focus the discussion on whether to accept a practically committing statement as a common ground or rather reject it.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jedediah Allen, Kristin Andrews, Jeremy Carpendale, Jay Garfield, Hande Ilgaz, Eleonora Mercatelli, Josef Perner, Silvano Zipoli Caiani, and many anonymous reviewers for useful discussion and comments on previous versions of this article.

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  1. Department of Literature and Philosophy, University of Florence, Via della Pergola, 60, 50121, Florence, Italy

    Marco Fenici

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Fenici, M. How children approach the false belief test: social development, pragmatics, and the assembly of Theory of Mind. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 181–201 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09709-8

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