Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies

Abstract

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.

Figure 1.

Maps showing the locations of the Salar (China), Shuar/Colono (Ecuador), and Yasawan (Fiji) field sites. (Online version in colour.)

Figure 2.

Verbal preferential-looking false-belief task. (a) Set-up trials (striped bars represent matching picture and unstriped bars represent non-matching picture) and (b) test trial (striped bars represent initial-location picture and unstriped bars represent current-location picture). Bars show mean looking times, error bars show standard errors of the mean, and asterisks denote significant differences between two bars (p<0.05, two-tailed).

Figure 3.

Verbal anticipatory-looking false-belief task. Bars show mean looking times, error bars show standard errors of the mean, and asterisks denote significant differences between two bars (p<0.05, two-tailed). Striped bars represent target container and unstriped bars represent non-target container.

Figure 4.

Non-verbal violation-of-expectation false-belief task. Bars show mean looking times, error bars show standard errors of the mean, and asterisks denote significant differences between two bars (p<0.05, two-tailed). Striped bars represent different-object event and unstriped bars represent identical-object event.