Is only seeing really believing?: Sources of the true belief in the false belief task

Abstract

It has been argued that young preschoolers cannot correctly attribute a false belief to a deceived actor (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). The present study considers three possible sources of difficulty for the young child on the false belief task: (a) The child may be unable to change the truth value of a representation as is required in the standard false belief task; (b) the fact that the deceived actor's belief was acquired by visual experience, normally a reliable source of information, makes it harder for the child to consider it false; and (c) the child's own visual experience of the object's true location, and therefore the certainty with which the child knows the object's true location, make it impossible to ignore. The present experiment tests these hypotheses by contrasting the standard false belief task with two testimony conditions. In both testimony conditions the false belief is stipulated as false from the beginning (the deceiver announces that he will tell a lie); no change of truth status is involved. The difference in the two testimony conditions is that in the ‘seen’ condition the subject sees the object's true location, while in the ‘unseen’ condition the subject is merely told the object's true location. Those 3-year-olds in the ‘unseen’ condition successfully attributed a false belief, while 3-year-olds in the two other conditions did not. This pattern of results supports the third hypothesis.