ABSTRACT
The same kind of supposition is made about children’s emerging ability to acknowledge false belief, which at least superficially seems to conform to a stage-like transition. The child will progress from apparently being unable to acknowledge false belief to being able to pass such a test, so long as he or she is clinically normal. The smallest investigation had a sample of 36 children and the largest had a sample of 66. The younger children gave correct judgements about 28% of the time, which is typical, but surprisingly exactly the same percentage figure emerged from the older children. On the face of things, to say that young children have a bias toward reality might seem like a mere description of the kind of error they make. Children tended to judge correctly that Daily thought there were Smarties in the tube, more so than under a control condition in which the tube had contained a pencil all along.
