Young children's reasoning about beliefs

Abstract

We present three investigations of children's early understanding of belief, that is, their knowledge of such internal mental attitudes as thinking, knowing, and guessing. The findings demonstrate that even quite young children, 3-year-olds, understand beliefs as internal mental states separate from desires but joined with desires in a larger belief–desire reasoning scheme. Such young children can appropriately predict actions given information as to a character's beliefs and desires, understand that information about beliefs is a necessary addition to information about desires to explain or predict actions, can appropriately infer the presence or absence of belief given information as to a character's seeing or not seeing a relevant situation, and can predict the appropriate emotional reaction to the outcomes of belief–desire caused actions. The results are situated in a larger description of young children's mentalistic naive psychology.