Young children's understanding of fact beliefs versus value beliefs

Child Dev. 1990 Aug;61(4):915-28.

Abstract

Recent research on the development of children's knowledge about the mind has shown that young 3-year-olds have difficulty inferring that another person holds a false belief about a matter of verifiable fact, even when provided with considerable help. 4 studies tested the hypothesis that they would have less difficulty inferring that another person holds an odd, nonnormative belief about a matter of taste or value--one which, like the false fact belief, they themselves do not hold. On fact-belief tasks, an experimenter acted as if, or even explicitly stated that, she believed that the contents of a container were other than what the children knew to be the case. On value-belief tasks, she behaved as if she believed that a stimulus had a good or bad taste, smell, or appearance, whereas they thought it had the opposite. The results of all 4 studies confirmed the hypothesis.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Attention
  • Child Development*
  • Child, Preschool
  • Concept Formation*
  • Discrimination Learning*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Imitative Behavior
  • Male
  • Reality Testing*
  • Smell
  • Social Values*
  • Taste
  • Visual Perception