What connects two distant things from the title?
Psychologists can use dolls to reveal how we judge true and false beliefs in the world around us. Yet not everybody has this talent. as Jason G Goldman discovers.
In a scientific experiment, children were invited to watch a scene featuring two dolls, then asked make a decision about what they saw – see if you make the same choice as they did.
A puppet-doll called Sally, who has a marble (a ball). She places it into a basket, and then leaves the room. Next, another doll, Anne, steals the marble from Sally's basket, and moves it into her own. Sally returns, without known about Anne's trickery.
If you watched this EXPERIMENT, where do you think Sally will look for her marble? It seems obvious – her own basket – but not everybody gets the answer right. Some children, and many animals, try to imagine Sally’s perspective.
This talent is a signature of “theory of mind” – an ability I have been exploring in my previous two columns, on deception and distinguishing intention from happenstance. We share those two simpler forms of mindreading with other animals – but passing the Sally-Anne test requires far more sophisticated thinking.
Why? You must be able to hold two contradictory ideas at once. First, you must know the true state of the world: the marble is in Anne's basket. Second, you must understand Sally's flawed perspective of the world: Sally believes the marble is still in her own basket. In other words, you must simultaneously maintain both a true belief and a false belief in your mind without confusing the two.
Research in the intervening decades has refined that conclusion, but the Sally-Anne task and others like it have been used extensively as a clever method for detecting the more sophisticated forms of theory of mind. Most replications of the Sally-Anne task with typically developing children have found that four-year-old children tend to pass the test, but that younger children usually fail.
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