Different cultures, same Theory of Mind

(me: Never!)

For nearly 3 decades since Wimmer and Perner (1983), psychologists have used the canonical false-belief task to detect children’s development of their theory of mind ability.

Could you repeat that?

Theory of Mind: the specific cognitive ability to attribute mental states–beliefs, desires, motives, knowledge, intent, etc–to oneself, and to agents other than oneself, in order to explain or predict behavior, i.e. Henry beat me up because he was angry.

(the original) False-belief task: the children were shown two dolls, Sally and Ann, playing with a marble. Ann puts the marble in box A and then leaves the room. Then Sally took the marble out of box A, plays with it, and returns the marble into a different box B. The children were then asked, “Where would Ann look for the marble when she returns? Box A or B?” A = pass, B = fail.

Typically, a majority of children 5 years or older pass the test, and all 3-year-olds fail. A biological mechanism was thought to underly this 3rd-5th year window, since autistic children fail false-belief tasks even when their mental age is over 6 years old. However, the fact that deaf children without any brain impairments also have delayed false-belief understanding suggests that the nature of ToM development may be experiential, and therefore prone to social/cultural influences.

Although the bulk of the ToM research in children involving false-belief tasks were done with Western/European children, very few cross-cultural studies have been conducted and they produced mixed and unreliable results for comparison.

In a study by Callaghan et al (2005), a single, standardized procedure was used to measure false-belief understanding in children in 5 cultures–Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand–and found that there was a shift from pass to fail between the ages of 3 and 5 years in all 5 cultures.

Whether the synchrony is the result of biological human development or from experiences universal in all cultures remains an open question. But do these results mean that ToM is culture-neutral? I hope not.

What this study suggests is that in all cultures, there is evidence for a common “starting point” for ToM understanding. However, as children matures into adults, they may nevertheless develop different expressions of same theories of mind, or different articulations of more complex theories, in different cultures. After all, if different cultures have different explanations for the same behavior, might this not suggest different theories of mind despite the synchrony of onset?

Stay tuned.

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Callaghan T., Rochat, P., Lillard, A., Claux M.L., Odden, H., Itakura, S., Tapanya, S., & Singh S. (2005) Synchrony in the onset of mental-state reasoning: Evidence from five cultures. Psychological Science, 16, 5, 378-384

Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983) Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103-128