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. 2021 Jan;92(1):54-75.
doi: 10.1111/cdev.13437. Epub 2020 Aug 25.

Only Familiar Information is a "Curse": Children's Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know

Siba Ghrear  1 , Klint Fung  1 , Taeh Haddock  1 , Susan A J Birch  1
Affiliations

Only Familiar Information is a "Curse": Children's Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know

Siba Ghrear et al. Child Dev. 2021 Jan.

Abstract

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge.

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