The impact of knowledge on false belief reasoning in young children

Studies have shown that adults are susceptible to a cognitive bias to attribute their own knowledge of an outcome to an uninformed person when they have a plausible reason to do so. The present research examines whether the plausibility of privileged knowledge of an outcome also influences 7-year-old children's false belief reasoning by making them susceptible to a bias to extend this knowledge to an uninformed person. Eighty-eight children aged 7 years were randomly assigned to one of 6 conditions on a modified false belief displacement task. The plausibility of children's knowledge of an outcome was manipulated in 6 different conditions. Results showed that at 7 years of age, children are aware of the plausibility of their own knowledge of an outcome in relation to other potential outcomes. However, children were susceptible to a bias to attribute their own knowledge to a naïve protagonist only under conditions where the implausibility of their own knowledge was ambiguous or not well defined. These findings were discussed in light of two theories proposed to explain false belief reasoning: a fluency misattribution hypotheses and executive functioning.