ABSTRACT
One view of the development of a theory of mind that deserves special credit for its level of elaboration has been formulated by Wellman (1990). He suggested that a basic folk theory of mind takes the form of simple belief-desire psychology, which provides a conceptual framework to predict and explain human action. This is the notion that people usually act to satisfy their desires, in conjunction with the understanding that their beliefs about the state of reality feed into this. Hence, if an individual holds a false belief, then paradoxically, they might even act in a way that thwarts their desire. Wellman claims it is possible to demonstrate that children understand the role of desire in behaviour from about age 2 years, but that it is not until about age 4 years that children acquire an understanding of belief that could feed into their system of folk psychology. Superficially, there seems to be a fundamental problem with this account because it appears not adequately to explain why young children have difficulty acknowledging their own prior false belief in a Smarties deceptive box task (Gopnik & Astington, 1988). In this task, they are not required to explain action but simply need to give an explicit acknowledgement of what they had thought. Neither does the concept of desire seem to be an issue that could obscure a nascent ability to acknowledge belief, given that children would probably have desired there to be Smarties, not pencils, inside the box.
