Limitations in reasoning about false beliefs in adults: the effect of priming or the curse of knowledge?

• Authors: Agnieszka Dębska , Krystyna Komorowska
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Birch & Bloom (2007) suggest that adults’ reasoning about other people’s mental states is influenced by their privileged knowledge about reality. When asked where a person described in a story would search for a missing object, participants tend to judge with higher probability that the person would search in a particular box when they know that the object is indeed in that box. However, the results of that experiment could be an effect of unintended priming in the experimental materials. The increased attention towards the box might be caused by reading about it in the task instructions. In a new version of the experiment, we controlled for this factor by priming different locations in the instructions. The results show that it is unlikely that priming is the source of Birch and Bloom’s observations: only knowledge about reality changed the participants’ strategies in reasoning about the actions of others.

Keywords

EN

curse of knowledge; mental contamination; theory of mind

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Psychology of Language and Communication
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 269-278

Dates

published

2013-12-01

online

2013-12-31

Contributors

author

Agnieszka Dębska

• University of Warsaw

author

Krystyna Komorowska

• University of Warsaw

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/plc-2013-0017