Abstract
When given privileged information of an object’s true location, adults often overestimate the likelihood that a protagonist holding a false belief will search in the correct location for that object. This type of egocentric bias is often labelled the ‘curse of knowledge’. Interestingly, the magnitude of this bias may be modulated by the social distance between the perspective taker and target. However, this social distance effect has yet to be fully demonstrated when adults reason about false beliefs. Using a continuous false belief task, we investigated i) whether adults were biased by their own knowledge when reasoning about another’s false belief, ii) whether the magnitude of this egocentric bias was modulated by social distance, and iii) whether this social distance effect extended to a heterospecific out-group, namely a dog. To test these hypotheses we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 283), we used an established continuous false belief task, in Experiment 2 (N = 281) we modified this task, and Experiment 3 (N = 744) was a direct replication of Experiment 2. Across these experiments, the curse of knowledge effect was reliably replicated when adults mentalised about an in-group protagonist, and replicated in two of the three studies (Experiments 1 and 3) when adults mentalised about out-group protagonists. In an internal-meta analysis, the curse of knowledge effect was present across all conditions, and there was no effect of social distance. Hence, overall these data are not consistent with the hypothesis that social distance modulates adults’ egocentric biases when reasoning about false beliefs. The finding that egocentric biases of a similar magnitude were observed when adults mentalised about an in-group protagonist and a dog suggests that interpersonal dissimilarity is not in itself sufficient to reduce egocentric bias when reasoning about false beliefs.
Highlights
We possess the ability to attribute mental states to others, this so-called Theory of Mind is often sub-optimal
The last two rows give the effect sizes for the curse of knowledge effect, which were calculated both using the logit transformed data used in the statistical analyses, and from the raw data, following [4] and [12]
ÃÃÃ denotes that the mean across the informed conditions differed significantly from the ambiguous conditions at α = 0.001
Summary
We possess the ability to attribute mental states to others, this so-called Theory of Mind is often sub-optimal. Epley et al [5] proposed that egocentric biases arise because perspective taking, including Theory of Mind, follows an anchor and adjustment mechanism (see [6]) By this account, the perspective taker first projects their own mental state onto another, and serially adjusts away from this egocentric anchor to arrive at the other’s perspective. Egocentric biases are observed when adults complete false belief tasks which measure a continuous dependent variable [4,7] In their seminal study, Birch & Bloom [4] used a modified false belief task in which a protagonist, Vicki, placed her violin in a blue container, one of a total of four differently coloured containers. Despite Vicki’s belief of the violin’s location being identical between conditions, participants who knew the violin was in the red container reported it more likely that Vicki would search there, compared to participants ignorant of the violin’s true location
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