Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

General discussion

References

Abstract

Increasing evidence suggests that counterfactual reasoning is involved in false belief reasoning. Because existing work is correlational, we developed a manipulation that revealed a signature of counterfactual reasoning in participants’ answers to false belief questions. In two experiments, we tested 3- to 14-year-olds and found high positive correlations (r = .56 and r = .73) between counterfactual and false belief questions. Children were very likely to respond to both questions with the same answer, also committing the same type of error. We discuss different theories and their ability to account for each aspect of our findings and conclude that reasoning about others’ beliefs and actions requires similar cognitive processes as using counterfactual suppositions. Our findings question the explanatory power of the traditional frameworks, theory theory and simulation theory, in favor of views that explicitly provide for a relationship between false belief reasoning and counterfactual reasoning.

Introduction

Counterfactual situations reflect the world as it would be had things been different. False beliefs are counterfactual insofar as they represent the world as it is not. Suppose that ‘‘Max” puts his chocolate into the drawer. Later, in his absence, his mum (mother) bakes a cake, uses some of the chocolate, and puts it in the cupboard. At this point, Max falsely believes that his chocolate is still in the drawer. Children older than 4 years typically predict that Max will search for his chocolate in the drawer even though it is no longer there. Younger children, until about 3½ years, indicate the item’s true location (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001).1

The false belief task has become an important indicator of children’s acquisition of our folk psychology explaining how people act and why, which is thought to be based on mental states, in particular beliefs and desires. The task is for methodological reasons the best indicator of understanding belief as a mental state because it obligates a separation between the objective conditions and the agent’s subjective view. Children’s performance on the false belief task has been found to correlate with their ability to answer counterfactual questions (Riggs, Peterson, Robinson, & Mitchell, 1998; see also many subsequent studies in Fig. 1) around 4 years of age. This relationship remains difficult to explain for the traditional theories about folk psychology, for example, theory theory and simulation theory