The Curse of Knowledge in Reasoning About False Beliefs

Abstract

ABSTRACT-Assessing what other people know and believe is critical for accurately understanding human action. Young children find it difficult to reason about false beliefs (i.e., beliefs that conflict with reality). The source of this difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Here we show that if sensitive-enough measures are used, adults show deficits in a false-belief task similar to one used with young children. In particular, we show a curse-of-knowledge bias in false-belief reasoning. That is, adults' own knowledge of an event's outcome can compromise their ability to reason about another person's beliefs about that event. We also found that adults' perception of the plausibility of an event mediates the extent of this bias. These findings shed light on the factors involved in false-belief reasoning and are discussed in light of their implications for both adults' and children's social cognition.Reasoning about what other people believe is often essential for predicting and interpreting human action. A wealth of research has investigated children's appreciation that the mind can misrepresent reality-that is, their appreciation that people can hold false beliefs. Most research on children's false-belief reasoning has utilized some variant of the displacement task (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985;Wimmer & Perner, 1983). For example, subjects are told a story about Sally, who puts her candy in a box and leaves the room. In her absence, another character moves the candy to a basket. When Sally returns, where will she look for her candy? The right answer, that she will look in the box, requires attributing a false belief to Sally. Fouryear-olds tend to do fairly well at such tasks, but younger children tend to fail (see Wellman, Cross, & Watson's, 2001, meta-analysis). Younger children tend to answer in accord with their own knowledge, saying that Sally will think the candy is in the basket.The source of children's difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Some researchers interpret children's difficulties on these tasks as reflecting a conceptual deficit: Perhaps young children lack a concept of belief or a concept of mental representation more generally (e.g., Gopnik, 1993;Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987;Wellman, 1990;Wellman et al., 2001). An alternative view is that young children's problems are due to more general cognitive factors such as memory and processing limitations, and thus not necessarily indicative of a conceptual limitation (e.g., Fodor, 1992;German & Leslie, 2000;Leslie, 1987;Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Roth & Leslie, 1998;Zaitchik, 1990; for a discussion, see Bloom & German, 2000).According to one version of this alternative, children have the same bias in perspective taking as adults, only to a greater extent. In earlier work (Birch & Bloom, 2003), we showed that 3-and 4-year-olds are more susceptible than 5-year-olds to a cognitive bias found in adults, the curse of knowledge (see also Bernstein, Atance, Loftus, & Meltzoff, 2004;Pohl & Haracic, 2005). We adopted this term f...

A Bayesian framework for knowledge attribution: Evidence from semantic integration

“…Thus the posterior probabilities will typically involve some degree of uncertainty, rather than taking on values of 0 or 1. Of course, observers may not entirely succeed in screening off direct knowledge of truth when they calculate the agent's posteriors and their own amended posteriors given phenomena such as hindsight bias (Fischhoff, 1975) and the so-called ''curse of knowledge'' (e.g., Birch & Bloom, 2007). However, such errors are unlikely to alter the relative order of knowledge attribution across conditions, on which we focus in deriving predictions.…”

“…Philosophers once commonly accepted that knowledge is justified true belief (JTB; Ayer, 1956;Plato, 1961 class of thought experiments now known as Gettier cases (Cohen, 1998;Greco, 2003;Lewis, 1996;Sosa, 2007;Turri, 2011;Williamson, 2002;Zagzebski, 1996). Gettier cases (named after their originator; Gettier, 1963) are situations in which an agent holds a justified true belief, but unexpected elements of the situation (allegedly) prevent the agent from truly ''knowing.''…”

Impression and Information Management: On the Strategic Self- Regulation of Innocent and Guilty Suspects

“…Similar to the curse of knowledge, which involves a tendency for one to be biased by one's own current expertise on an issue when inferring another's understanding (Birch & Bloom, 2007), the illusion of transparency suggests that people cannot sufficiently discount the phenomenology of their own experiences when making inferences about the knowledge of others. Further, innocent suspects' attitude towards questioning echoes the fundamental justice motive: people hold a motivated belief that the world is fair and that bad things do not happen to undeserving people (Hafer & Bègue, 2005).…”

How Down is a Downbeat? Feeling Meter and Gravity in Music and Dance

“…If it seems too dramatic a leap from the notion of prejudice in Agawu's sense to epistemic injustice in Fricker's, then let me put it another way: that in the realm of meter, musicians are particularly prone to the "curse of knowledge," that is, the inability to imagine what it is like to be naïve about something that we already know (Birch & Bloom, 2007;Camerer, Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989). We cannot necessarily know or imagine what it is like to hear like someone else, or to move like them, but it is perhaps even harder to un-know what we know, to unhear music in the way that we have already heard it.…”