Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [50]
If the child you’ve enlisted for this experiment is your own, you already know that kids of this age are stupendous thinkers. They speak and understand their native language (or languages) with ease, and add words and concepts with a rapidity that is the envy of every adult. They are insatiably curious, highly attentive to the world around them, and capable of impressive feats of memory and concentration. They understand cause and effect and can reason about when, why, and how things happen. They make inferences about the world around them that, even when wrong, display a remarkable attentiveness to their environment. They play games, not to mention invent them. They negotiate complex social interactions, and they understand that different people can have different needs, desires, and emotions. Depending on the family they were born into, they may already be reading about star-bellied sneetches or learning to play hockey or studying the violin. And yet, without fail, these same brilliant children will confidently report that Sally will look for her candy bar not in the basket where she put it, but where it actually is: in the cupboard where it was hidden while she was out of the room.
To adults (or, for that matter, six-year-olds), this answer is baffling. We understand that there is no way Sally could know the real whereabouts of her candy bar—literally no mechanism by which she could acquire that knowledge—because she wasn’t around to witness Ann relocating it. But this experiment suggests that young children don’t care about such mechanisms. For them, it seems, the world and the mind enjoy an automatic correspondence: Sally thinks the candy bar is in the cupboard because the candy bar is in the cupboard. Adults, whether they are realists or relativists, recognize that the mind contains a kind of personalized representation of reality—the world as rendered by you or me or Sally. Kids, by contrast, seem to think the mind contains a replica of reality: the world as rendered by Xerox. Apparently, they don’t yet understand that beliefs about the world can be at variance with the world itself.*
If the Sally-Ann test doesn’t seem like conclusive proof of this claim, consider the following, even more astonishing variant of it. In this version, children are shown a box with a picture of candy on the front and asked what they think is inside. Reasonably enough, they say “candy.” When they open it, however, they find (presumably to their disappointment) that it is full of pencils. Here’s the astonishing part: if you then ask the children what they thought was in the box before they opened it—that is, about twenty seconds earlier—they will insist that they thought it contained pencils. What children maintain about the imaginary Sally they also maintain about themselves: that their beliefs about the world cannot deviate from the world as it really is.
This faith in the perfect accuracy of our beliefs is fleeting. By the age of five, virtually all children can pass the Sally-Ann test with ease. In coming to do so, these children have acquired what developmental psychologists call “representational theory of mind.” That is, they’ve figured out what a mind is, at least in general terms—not a photocopy of reality but a private and somewhat idiosyncratic means for making sense of the world—and they’ve figured out that everybody has one. This changed understanding leads to striking new insights: that beliefs about the world can be at odds with the world itself; that my beliefs can be at odds with yours; that other people don’t necessarily know everything I know; and, conversely, that I don’t necessarily know everything other people know.
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