Social cognition
Can 3-year-olds act on false beliefs before they can talk about them?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Three-year-olds opened the door an adult would expect to use based on her false belief, yet in the same trial they failed to say where she thought the toy was.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Between-subjects experiment randomly assigning children to a false-belief or true-belief change-of-location scenario, with action (door opening) and verbal responses measured within the same trial.
- N
- N=47 · 47 three-year-olds: 21 in the true-belief condition and 26 in the false-belief condition; ten further children were excluded.
- Population
- Three-year-old children from a New York University research-volunteer database.
- Outcome
- Whether children opened the door matching the adult's belief and whether they answered an explicit belief question in line with that belief.
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Key findings
Children chose the belief-consistent door above chance in both conditions (a proportion of 0.70 overall), so they used false beliefs to guide action. But on the verbal question they answered correctly far more often after a true belief (proportion 0.71) than a false belief (proportion 0.30). In the false-belief condition more children passed the door test but failed the question (27%) than the reverse (8%), and asking the question first did not change which door they opened.
Methodology
An adult left a toy in a coloured box and went behind a curtain, saying she would return through the door matching that box. The child helped move the toy to the other box either while she was watching (true belief) or while she was away (false belief). The child was asked where the adult thought the toy was, and when the doorbell rang the child chose which door to open for her.
Limitations
The sample was small and drawn from one university's volunteer families, and only 3-year-olds were tested, so the study cannot show how implicit and explicit understanding develop or relate over time. The door task was still prompted, so it is unclear whether success depends on response modality (action versus words) or on whether children are directly asked about thoughts. The results support a distinction between two kinds of knowledge but do not reveal their mechanisms.
How this study connects
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