Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account

Abstract

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children’s performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the 1st year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers’ performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolers’ performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction.

Scaling Theory of Mind in a Small‐Scale Society: A Case Study From Vanuatu

“…Furthermore, it is critical not to conflate the absence of expression with the absence of capacity. Roby and Scott () suggest that social influences may facilitate the use of ToM more than they enable its emergence. In Vanuatu, such influences may significantly impact the use and performance of ToM far beyond the accepted onset at 4–5 years of age.…”

Early False-Belief Understanding

“…Multiple extraneous factors can contribute to failure in both traditional and nontraditional tasks [71,96]. In a recent nontraditional preferential-looking task, for example, 3-year-olds with low verbal ability failed (i.e., were below chance in looking preferentially at the correct picture) when the false-belief narrative was made linguistically ambiguous [71].…”

Little pranksters: Inhibitory control mediates the association between false belief understanding and practical joking in young children

“…ToM as a social construct is inevitably shaped by social input (Hughes & Devine, 2015). The use of the ability to represent beliefs is influenced by social experiences too (Roby & Scott, 2016). Having siblings augments the quantity and intensity of the social interaction within the family, which in turn provides ideal circumstances for children’s social development (Hughes & Devine, 2015).…”