Is Little Red Riding Hood afraid of her grandmother? Cognitive vs. emotional response to a false belief

Abstract

The essentials of a theory of mind are generally considered to be acquired around 4 years of age when the child succeeds in the standard ‘Maxi task’ (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). However, rational thought is not attained before 7-8 years of age in other domains of cognitive development. This study demonstrates that the mastery of mental state attribution using logical criteria is not reached before age 7-8 years when several assessments of a belief need to be coordinated. This is revealed by the dissociation between the cognitive and emotional assessments of a false belief which yield contradictory responses in most of the children who succeed on the standard task. The results were replicated in five experiments with a total of 254 children aged 3-8 years. The analysis of this decalage focuses on the autonomy of emotional attributions and the semi-mental and semi-behavioural structure of belief understanding implied in the standard task. An increase in processing capacity leads to a rational concept of belief around 7-8 years: this concept is called here ‘third-person', in opposition to ‘second-person’ which involves only an initial differentiation from the first-person point of view. Second-person depends on an opposition between the self and the other in terms of a single, modular evaluation of belief, whereas third-person depends on an integration among various assessments and provides a consistent and isotropic concept of belief.