Young children’s difficulty with false belief: A conceptual shift in the development of thinking?

The piece of evidence that forms the cornerstone of the theory theory is young children’s apparent difficulty with false belief. The results were that only 42% of children aged 4 and 5 years judged that Maxi would look for his chocolate in the place that he left it. The rest judged that he would look for the chocolate where they knew it currently was. In contrast, 92% of children aged 6 and 7 years judged that Maxi would look in the place he left his chocolate, demonstrating that they could acknowledge another person’s false belief. Children aged around 3 years tended to answer this question in the same way that they answered the question asking about another person’s belief: They reported the current content of “pencil”. A less exotic explanation for young children’s difficulty with the various tasks is that perhaps they misunderstand the question the experimenter is asking.