Citation

Flavell JH, Flavell ER, Green FL, Moses LJ. Child Dev. 1990; 61(4): 915-928.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Stanford University, CA 94305-2099.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1990, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

2209196

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.

Language: en