Museum of Science, Boston

Reasoning about Social Situations

Learning to navigate social situations is an important part of growing up. Some cognitive scientists study children in order to develop a better sense of how children perceive other people and how this might affect their social interactions.

Theory of Mind

How do children's explanations affect their beliefs about the world?

This study examined how children's explanations may help them learn about other people's minds. We used a "false belief task", which explored whether children understand that a person can hold a belief about the world that is not true.

False belief tasks are presented as stories. A character hides her toy in one location and leaves. While she is away, another character moves the toy to a new location. When asked where the first character will look for her toy upon returning, children under four predict the new location, even though the character could not know that the toy moved. Children four and older who understand "false belief" predict that the character will look in her original hiding place.

Previous research had shown that explaining surprising evidence may help children learn that other people can hold beliefs that are different from their own. This study aimed to figure out why this helps, by reading children false-belief stories that showed the character searching in the new location of the toy.

If explanations help children question their beliefs, then as children read more stories they should have begun to demonstrate false belief understanding. In contrast, if explanations merely help children pay closer attention, then children should have been less likely to demonstrate false belief understanding.

When researchers asked children in the study why the character looked for the toy in a new location, rather than where she'd left it, children demonstrated false belief understanding by spontaneously generating reasons (i.e. "she wanted to look there" or "she heard him go over there"). This suggests that when children this age are presented with evidence that conflicts with what they think will happen, it can impact their beliefs about the world.


Other Resources

This research was presented at the Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. You can download and read the paper: Intuitive Theories of Mind: A Rational Approach to False Belief here.

Learn about other research related to Reasoning about Social Situations.

This research is conducted by the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at MIT

Try it at the Museum

Store food like a chipmunk!

Pretend to be a chipmunk with your child, using the chipmunk puppets and acorns in the chipmunk burrow in the Discovery Center. Have one chipmunk hide an acorn and a second chipmunk uncover the hidden acorn and store it somewhere else.

Where does your child think the first chipmunk will look for his acorn when returning to eat it?

If you play this game each time you visit the Discovery Center, does your child begin to understand false belief and base his/her prediction on the perspective of the chipmunk whose acorn was moved?

Try it at Home

Hide and Seek

Children love to play "hide-and-seek", and they often have favorite "hiding spots" that they use again and again. The next time your child plays hide-and-seek, watch where your child and his/her friends tend to hide. Then, join in on the fun and hide in a spot that your child would not normally use.

Does your child take on the adults' perspective in order to figure out what spaces would be big enough for a grownup to hide in, or does your child only look for you in his/her favorite hiding spots?