Children are cursed: an asymmetric bias in mental-state attribution.

Full Abstract

Young children have problems reasoning about false beliefs. We suggest that this is at least partially the result of the same curse of knowledge that has been observed in adults--a tendency to be biased by one's own knowledge when assessing the knowledge of a more naive person. We tested 3- to 5-year-old children in a knowledge-attribution task and found that young children exhibited a curse-of-knowledge bias to a greater extent than older children, a finding that is consistent with their greater difficulty with false-belief tasks. We also found that children's misattributions were asymmetric. They were limited to cases in which the children were more knowledgeable than the other person; misattributions did not occur when the children were more ignorant than the other person. This suggests that their difficulty is better characterized by the curse of knowledge than by more general egocentrism or rationality accounts.

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Author information

Author/s: Birch, Susan A J (SA); Bloom, Paul (P);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA. susan.birch(-atsign-)yale.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS (Psychol Sci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-May; vol 14 (issue 3) : pp 283-6

Dates: Created 2003/05/13; Completed 2003/08/05; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12741755, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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