Children's Theory of Mind: Understanding of Desire, Belief and ...

Children’s Theory of Mind: Understanding of 

Desire, Belief and Emotion with Social 

Referents 

Leanh Nguyen, New York University, and Douglas Frye, University of 

Pennsylvania 

Abstract 

Preschoolers’ understanding of belief, desire, and emotion was assessed in a new false 

belief task that explored children’s mental state reasoning about social situations. The 

social analog task presented a change in a partner’s play activity rather than a change 

in the location of a physical object. Two main differences from the usual pattern of 

theory of mind results were obtained. Five-year-olds had more difficulty understanding 

a false belief about another’s current social activity compared to a false belief about a 

physical situation. The understanding of desire exhibited a 3- to 5-year age change that 

may have been shown because the social situation involved conflicting desires. When 

there was a conflict, the younger children tended to disregard the stated desire and 

exhibited ‘social opportunism’ by misattributing desires to permit a social interaction. 

The new results give a more varied picture of the development of theory of mind, and 

argue for expanding its study into social frames of reference.. 

Keywords: Mental states reasoning; social understanding; theory of mind 

It has been recognized within the new study of children’s ‘theory of mind’ that 

understanding mental states might be especially important for social development 

because mental states provide unique clues for making sense of people’s behavior 

(Dunn, 1991a & b; Leekam, 1993; Moore & Frye, 1991; Pillow, 1991; Raver & 

Leadbeater, 1993) and for interpreting cultural meanings (Bruner & Feldman, 1993; 

Feldman, 1992). Several lines of inquiry support this possibility, including the existing 

research on children’s perspective-taking and social reasoning (see Bennett, 1993; 

Flavell, 1992; or Forrester, 1992 for reviews), the renewed interest in children’s ability 

to manipulate the mental states of others in deception (Chandler, Fritz, & Hala, 

1989; Peskin, 1992; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe, & Tidswell, 1991; Sodian, 1991; and 

Sodian, Taylor, Harris, & Perner, 1991) and the recognition that impairments in 

social functioning and theory of mind co-occur in people with autism (Frith, Happe, 

& Siddons, 1994). 

The authors would like to thank Arthur Golub, Sarah Rubin, Georgene Grossblatt and Donna DelCiello 

for their contributions to the research. Please address correspondence to: Leanh Nguyen, Department of 

Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY, 10003, USA or Douglas Frye, 

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. Email: 

leanh@xp.psych.nyu.edu or doug@xp.psych.nyu.edu. 

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, 

Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Children’s Theory of Mind with Social Referents 71 

The search for the social precursors and consequences of theory of mind has 

recently been expanded. The most informative of these studies are continuing, longitudinal 

efforts that incorporate naturalistic observations of children’s social lives. 

The search for prior social influences on the development of theory of mind has 

established that having siblings (Jenkins & Astington, 1996; Perner, Ruffman, & 

Leekam, 1994), engaging in more sophisticated pretend play with peers (Astington & 

Jenkins, 1995; Youngblade & Dunn, 1995), and being exposed to more frequent 

family discourse about causality and feeling states (Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, 

Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991) are associated with earlier success in understanding 

mental states. Research on the social consequences of theory of mind has found that 

children who better understand mental states subsequently exhibit closer communication 

with their friends (Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996) and may be more sensitive to 

teacher criticism at the beginning of school (Dunn, 1995). 

Although connections between theory of mind and social development are being 

discovered, the further issue of whether theory of mind actually changes children’s 

understanding of social interactions is unresolved. Theory of mind research has been 

innovative in part because it has studied the understanding of specific mental states, 

primarily belief, but also desire, intention, surprise, and irony among others. The 

concentration on specific mental states has begun to make it possible to analyze specific 

social transactions. For example, theory of mind research has characterized 

deception as an intentional act to give another a false belief. This same type of 

analysis can be extended to prosocial interactions. For instance, children’s willingness 

to play a game together can be seen to depend on both children having the 

desire to engage in the same activity and having the belief that they will be able to 

carry out this activity with the other person. An implication of this type of analysis is 

that if children’s understanding of belief and desire change, then their understanding 

of social situations involving these mental states should change too. 

Not enough may be known about children’s understanding of the mental states 

that shape social situations because theory of mind questions usually examine the 

child’s understanding of mental states regarding the physical world. The traditional 

false belief task, for instance, presents a story in which an object has been moved 

without the awareness of a character in the story (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). The 

child must identify the character’s mistaken belief about the location of the object. 

Five-year-olds typically have no difficulty understanding that the character will mistakenly 

think the object is still in the original place, whereas 3-year-olds claim the 

character will think it is in the new place. Assessing mental states when they refer to 

the physical world has the advantage that the facts of the matter can be made very 

clear, but it eliminates the possibility of studying the understanding of mental states 

that refer to people in social situations. 

The present study began to investigate children’s understanding of mental states 

that underlie social interaction. A new social analog to the traditional false belief 

task was constructed. Preschoolers were told a story about a main character, A, who 

is sharing a play activity (e.g., singing songs) with another character, B. In the story, 

the characters had generic names (e.g., Bunny Rabbit) and the events were acted out 

with toys props. At one point in the story, A momentarily leaves the room, after 

agreeing with B that they would still play the same activity. B continues to play, but 

in the middle of A’s absence suddenly changes to a different activity (e.g., playing 

tennis). This sequence of events makes it possible to assess the understanding of false 

belief about a social activity, instead of a physical object. The children were asked, 

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 Social Development, 8, 1, 1999

72 Leanh Nguyen and Douglas Frye 

‘What does A think B is doing right now, singing or playing tennis?’ Of course, if 

children understand false belief in this context, they will be able to say that A thinks 

that B is still engaged in the original activity. 

Responses to this story can be used to determine whether false belief understanding 

is similar across social and physical referents. There are reasons to suspect that 

understanding with social referents may be more of a challenge. Symons, 

McLaughlin, Moore, and Morine (1997) very recently found that 5-year-olds had 

less understanding of false belief when the belief was about the location of a caregiver 

than about the location of an object. There are many distinctions between the 

social and physical worlds that may affect false belief understanding. One is that 

social referents are more ‘volatile’ than physical ones. Although a physical situation 

may occasionally change on its own (e.g., when an object rolls away from where we 

put it), the moment-to-moment location of a person is much less predictable. 

Consequently, children may have more difficulty keeping separate the belief about 

the person’s location and the person’s actual location. 

A second difference is that social situations depend on the mental states of multiple 

actors. In the physical false belief task, the child only has to understand the mental 

states of the person thinking about the physical world. In the social instance, the child 

has to understand the thoughts of a person thinking about another person. 

Understanding the second person’s mental states does not help in determining the first 

person’s false belief. (In the play activity example, the child only has to consider A’s 

thoughts to determine that A will now be mistaken about the B’s current activity.) 

However, if social situations like play depend on agreement in mental states of the different 

participants, then the child may try to reconcile the multiple mental states 

rather than simply judging what the first person will be thinking about the second. 

The study also examined the importance of the mental state of desire for social 

understanding. Desires are as essential as beliefs in forming social interactions. A 

prosocial situation like play, for example, can only take place if both participants 

have the same desire to engage in a particular activity. The understanding of desire 

can be explored with the same social analog story outlined earlier. When the second 

character, B, changes activity from singing to tennis, it is possible to ask about the 

original character’s desire, just as it is possible to ask about original character’s 

belief. In the present study, the understanding of desire was assessed with the question, 

‘What does A want to do now, sing or play tennis?’ Because A was not present 

for the change in activity, understanding desire as a mental state would be shown by 

the answer that A still wants to play the original activity. 

Previous research suggests that it might be easier to understand desire than belief. 

For example, even 3-year-olds seem to recognize that when someone wants something, 

the desire is specific to that thing and influences what the person will subsequently 

do (Wellman & Woolley, 1990). However, there is other evidence that some 

aspects of desire are not understood until about the same time as belief. When there 

is a conflict in desires, as can happen in a competitive game, it has been found that 

children do not judge desire correctly until about age five (Moore et al., 1996). The 

timing of desire understanding has significance for theorizing about theory of mind 

because it bears on the question of whether desire and belief develop in concert or 

whether one leads to the understanding of the other. The present study will provide 

fresh information on this issue. Because conflicts in desire are characteristic of social 

situations, the social analog task gives a natural test of this question. It generates a 

conflict in desires when the shared activity is changed. 



Three different tasks were presented to 3- and 5-year-olds. The social activity false 

belief task asked what an absent character thinks another is currently doing. The 

social activity desire task asked what the absent character currently wants to do. 

Both of the social activity tasks employed the new social analog story of a change in 

shared play. A standard false belief task asked where an absent character thinks a 

physical object is after a change in its location. Different comparisons among the 

tasks were made to address the main objectives of the study. The social activity and 

standard false belief tasks were compared to learn whether false belief understanding 

is more difficult for social versus physical referents. The social activity false belief 

and social activity desire tasks were compared to see if the understanding of desire is 

similar to that of belief when they are assessed in the same type of story. The pattern 

of findings for both belief and desire will help to determine how mental states contribute 

to the understanding of social life. 

Experiment 1 

Method 

Participants 

Forty children from three preschools and one primary school in Manhattan participated. 

There were 20 3-year-olds (9 girls and 11 boys, mean age = 42.6 months, 

range = 36 to 46 months) and 20 5-year-olds (7 girls and 13 boys, mean age = 65.7 

months, range = 59 to 73 months). The children were proficient in English and came 

from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Their families were primarily middle and lower 

middle class. 

Materials 

Various toy figures and miniature props were used in acting out the stories. The figures 

were familiar cartoon characters (e.g., Smurf, Pinocchio) or had recognizable 

generic names (e.g., Bunny Rabbit, Panda Bear) so that the children could immediately 

identify which character was which in a story. 

Design and Procedure 

Each child responded to the three tasks in a short session lasting about ten minutes, 

and then again in a similar session about a week later. For any given child, different 

toy figures appeared in each of the three tasks. One forced choice question with a 

pair of tag alternatives was asked for each. The same counterbalanced order of tasks 

and tag alternatives was followed within each age group. The three tasks were given 

as in the following examples. 

Social activity false belief task. The child is shown a miniature book and two 

stuffed animals, a rabbit and a bear. The child is told: ‘Here are Bunny Rabbit and 

Bear. They said that they would read together. They are reading together. Now 

Bunny Rabbit leaves to go to another room. Bunny Rabbit cannot see or hear what 

we are doing. Bear changes what he is doing. He does not want to read anymore. He 

wants to sleep. He is sleeping now. What does Bunny Rabbit think Bear is doing? 

Does Bunny Rabbit think that Bear is reading, or does Bunny Rabbit think that 

Bear is sleeping ?’ 



Social activity desire task. The child is shown a small coloring book and plastic 

Pinocchio and Smurf figures. The child is told: ‘Here are Pinocchio and Smurf. They 

said that they would color pictures together. They are coloring some pictures 

together. Now Pinocchio leaves to go to another room. Pinocchio cannot see or hear 

what we are doing. Smurf changes what he is doing. He does not want to color pictures 

anymore. He wants to play music. He is playing music. What does Pinocchio 

want to do? Does Pinocchio want to play music, or does Pinocchio want to color 

pictures ?’ 

Standard false belief task with physical referents. The child is shown a green box, a 

black box, several crayons, and a stuffed animal shaped like a pig. The child is told: 

‘Here is Piggy. These are Piggy’s crayons. Piggy is putting them in the green box. 

Now Piggy leaves to go to another room. Piggy cannot hear or see what we are 

doing. I am going to move the crayons to the black box. They are in the black box 

now. Where does Piggy think the crayons are? Does Piggy think that they are in the 

green box, or does Piggy think that they are in the black box?’ 

Results 

Because the scenarios were presented twice, scores on each could be 0, 1 or 2. The 

mean scores for the 3-year-olds on the social activity false belief, social activity 

desire and standard false belief stories were 1.05, .7 and .9; whereas for the 5-yearolds 

they were 1.6, 1.35 and 1.7. These results were analyzed in a 2 (age) � 3 (task) 

repeated measures ANOVA, which produced a main effect for age F(1, 38) = 17.45, 

p < .001) favoring the 5-year-olds. Comparisons to chance of 50% revealed that only 

the 5-year-olds’ social activity desire and standard false belief scores (t’s(19) > 3.81, 

p’s < .05) differed from chance. Contrasts were performed to test the specific comparisons 

of whether false belief was more difficult with the social than physical referents 

and whether desire was easier than false belief when assessed in the same 

situation. A trend was found for false belief with social referents to be more difficult 

than with physical ones (t(39) > 1.98, p = .054). Correlations were computed to 

determine if the children’s responses were consistent across the tasks. A relation was 

found only between social activity and the standard physical false belief tasks (r = 

Table 1. Numbers of 3- and 5-Year-Olds Passing and Failing the Social Activity 

False Belief, Social Activity Desire, and Standard Physical False Belief Tasks in 

Experiment 1 

Task 

Social Activity Social Activity Standard Physical 

Age False Belief Desire False Belief 

3-year-olds 

Pass 5 5 7 

Fail 15 15 13 

5-year-olds 

Pass 12 13 16 

Fail 8 7 4 



.53, p < .001). This relation remained even when age in months was partialled from 

the correlation (r = .43, p < .01). 

To be certain that the group results were consistent with the individual patterns of 

responding, the data were also analyzed at the level of the individual child. Children 

were classified as passing a task if they succeeded on both presentations of it and as 

failing otherwise. The numbers of 3- and 5-year-olds who passed and failed the 

social activity false belief, social activity desire and standard false belief tasks are 

shown in Table 1. On each of the tasks, more of the 5-year-olds than the 3-year-olds 

succeeded (X2’s (1, N = 20) = 5.01, p’s < .05). And for each, only the distributions of 

the 5-year-olds differed from what would be expected by chance (X2’s (1, N = 20) = 

5.01, p’s < .05). Individual children’s success across the tasks was found, as before, 

only to be related between the social activity and standard physical false belief tasks 

(X2 (1, N = 20) = 11.43, p < .001). At the same time, there again was a trend for 

social to be more difficult than the standard task (McNemar Symmetry X2 (1, N = 

40) = 3.6, p = .058). Of the children who scored differently on the two tasks, 8 passed 

the standard but not the social, whereas only 2 did the reverse. 

Discussion 

The social activity false belief task produced the same, expected 3- to 5-year age 

change as the standard false belief task, although the social referents appeared to 

add to the difficulty of judging false belief. Only the 5-year-olds were able to say that 

the absent character believed that the partner was still playing the same activity or 

believed that the object was still in the original place, and they were slightly less successful 

for the partner’s activity than for the object’s location. The previous literature 

has indicated that 3-year-olds might perform as well as 5-year-olds when 

judging desire (Wellman & Woolley, 1990). However, the social activity desire task 

also produced a 3- to 5-year age change. Only the 5-year-olds understood that the 

absent character still wanted to play the original activity. Thus, when desire and 

belief were assessed in exactly the same type of story and when there was a conflict 

in desires present, both mental states exhibited roughly the same developmental 

pattern. 

The results of the social activity false belief task extend the relevance of theory of 

mind to the understanding of social situations. The 5-year-olds had a better understanding 

of the current social relation between the two play partners, and presumably 

about what could happen next, because they realized that the absent character 

was unaware that the other had changed activity. The results also indicated that the 

5-year-olds may have had more difficulty appreciating this false belief than they did the 

false belief about the location of a physical object. There are a variety of reasons why 

false belief could be harder to understand when it is about people in social situations 

than about inanimate objects in physical ones. People’s activities are presumably 

more volatile, or subject to spontaneous change, than are objects’ locations. Social 

situations are also unique in that they involve multiple sets of mental states, even 

though it may not actually be necessary to consider the mental states of all the different 

actors. In the social activity false belief task, there was no reason to consider the 

partner’s mental states in determining the absent character’s beliefs. Nonetheless, 

children may have mistakenly tried to do so. The same mistake cannot occur in the 

standard false belief task because only a single person’s thoughts about physical 

reality are involved. 



The results of Symons et al. (1997) would suggest that the presence of the other’s 

mental states is responsible for making false belief harder. Their initial experiment 

found that 5-year-olds were much better able to understand someone’s false belief 

about the location of an object than the location of a caregiver. Their second experiment 

explored the cause of this effect by comparing the understanding of false belief 

for the location of an object, a caregiver, an unrelated adult, an animal, and a caregiver 

who did not change locations intentionally but at another’s request. The 5- and 

6-year-olds found all of the false belief judgments to be difficult, with the exception 

of the physical object and the caregiver who moved per request. 

This remarkable discovery suggests that the children were inappropriately weighing 

the second set of mental states. They seemed to think that if a person or even 

animal acted on purpose then the absent character would necessarily know the 

other’s new location. It is also possible to explain the pattern using the volatility 

interpretation but the further assumption must be made that people’s actions necessarily 

become less changeable after they have been asked to do something. The possibility 

that the second set of mental states made the difference can be extended to 

the slightly poorer understanding of false belief for social activity in the current 

study. Because the partner acted on purpose to initiate the new activity, the children 

may have been more inclined to conclude wrongly that the absent character would 

know about the change. 

The results for the social activity desire task also produced a pattern that revealed 

an age-related change in the understanding of social interaction. The 5-year-olds 

alone seemed to recognize that the change in the partner’s activity would not automatically 

change what the absent character wanted to play. There is evidence that 3year-olds 

can reason about desire (Wellman & Woolley, 1990). The difference in the 

present study was that the change in the partner’s activity introduced a conflict in 

desire. It has been found that when desires are in conflict 3-year-olds do not evaluate 

them accurately (Moore et al., 1996). This point is particularly relevant in the current 

circumstances because conflicts in desire are unique to social situations. The 

results suggest that 3-year-olds engage in a sort of social opportunism in which they 

inappropriately ignore conflicts in desire in order to make a shared activity possible. 

In any case, the current findings indicate that 5-year-olds will have a more accurate 

understanding of social interaction than 3-year-olds do. They can recognize that 

social situations may have conflicts in desires and are less prone to override those 

conflicts when considering the mental states of the people involved. 

The results for desire have implications that are important for different theories of 

the development of theory of mind. At times, a distinction has been proposed 

between ‘simple’ desire that can be understood at three years (Wellman & Woolley, 

1990) and a more complicated form of desire understanding that is not attained until 

five years (Astington & Gopnik, 1991; Moore et al., 1996; Perner, Peerbhoy, & 

Lichterman, 1991). Moore et al. (1996) demonstrated that this distinction is needed 

when conflicting desires are present because 3-year-olds could not determine someone 

else’s desire when it conflicted with their own in a competitive game. These 

authors suggest that a deficit in executive function may account for the 3-year-olds’ 

difficulties. A deficit in executive function could prevent young children from putting 

aside thoughts about their own desires in the situation in order to determine the 

other person’s. 

The current results replicate the finding that conflicting desires are difficult for 

young children, and strengthen the possibility that there are two levels to the under- 



standing of desire. The results present a problem for an executive function account, 

however. In the current study, the children simply had to consider two characters’ 

desires, their own desires were not involved, yet the 3-year-olds still had difficulty. 

Consequently, executive function problems cannot be the sole explanation for what 

makes reasoning about conflicting desires difficult. It is significant that the results for 

desire matched those for belief. Conflicting desires may provide the best comparison 

to belief because false belief always entails a conflict. The child’s true belief about the 

situation is always at odds with the character’s false belief about it. The current 

study compared desire and belief understanding in the same type of story in which 

there was a conflict present in each. Under these circumstances, the developmental 

pattern was the same for both. This finding suggests that reasoning about any conflicting 

mental state is difficult (Flavell, 1988; Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1986; Frye, 

Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995), rather than that the understanding of desire is easier than 

belief. 

Experiment 2 

The first study yielded two surprising findings about preschoolers’ understanding of 

belief and desire in social situations. First, the 5-year-olds tended to show a poorer 

understanding of false belief when they had to consider social referents instead of 

physical ones. Second, the 3-year-olds did not demonstrate an earlier understanding 

of desire than belief. The first study deliberately took a restricted view of a social 

episode in order to obtain the clearest assessment of mental state understanding. An 

isolated question was asked at single point in a story that was then not completed. 

The second study assessed mental state understanding with a full sequence of story 

events that was more representative of a complete social interaction. Expanding the 

social analog used before, children were asked mental state questions before the play 

partners separated, while they were apart, and when they were reunited. New questions 

about emotion were added to determine if the age differences in mental state 

understanding found previously really make a difference for how children think the 

characters will react in the social situation when they rejoin each other. The full 

sequence made it possible to assess changes in the understanding of single mental 

states over the course of the story; examine the relations among the understanding of 

different mental states, including that of emotion; and confirm that the results of the 

first experiment were reliable. 

All of the different mental state questions were asked about one, complete narrative 

of events based on an expanded social analog story. The assessment of the children’s 

understanding of false belief in the social setting was expanded. As in the first 

experiment, the false belief social activity question was posed, so after the change in 

activity the children were asked what the absent character thought the partner was 

currently doing. The full narrative made it possible to incorporate new control questions 

about perceptual access. The children were asked whether the absent character 

could hear or see the change in activity to be certain they knew what it meant for the 

character to be away from the scene. The strongest finding with the addition of the 

new questions would be that the young children again claim the character knows 

about the new activity in spite of not seeing or hearing the change. 

Additional false belief questions were also introduced. The most important one 

asked a new question about social availability. When the absent character, A, was 

still out of the room and the partner, B, changed activity, then a new character, C, 



entered the story. C stated a willingness to continue the original activity with A. This 

additional event made it possible to ask the children a false belief question about the 

play partners’ availability. They were asked which partner, B or C, the absent character 

thought was currently available to play together. At this point in the story, correct 

false belief understanding would be shown by the answer that A still thinks B is 

available. If the false belief results follow what was found before, children should 

have as much trouble with false belief as it applies to this aspect of the social situation 

as they do for social activity. 

The full social episode also made it possible to conduct a much more extensive 

assessment of the understanding of desire. As before, the critical question for assessing 

the children’s understanding of desire was that of social activity desire, or what 

the absent character wants to do after the uncommunicated change in the partner’s 

activity. Several desire control questions were presented at the beginning of the story 

before the character left the room to be certain that the children knew that the two 

wanted to play the same activity. Of more interest, after the character left and the 

partner changed activity, the children were given a past desire activity question that 

asked what the character wanted to do just before leaving the room. If the 3-yearolds 

can answer this question correctly and yet again think that the absent character 

wants to play the new activity, then it can be ruled out their misconception is a function 

of forgetting what the character originally wanted to do. 

The extended social episode also permitted the study of children’s understanding 

of emotion. The attribution of emotion has previously been used to investigate 

young children’s conceptualization of the relation among desire, belief, and reality 

(Harris, 1989). Three-year-olds have been found to attribute happiness or sadness 

depending on whether a character’s desires are fulfilled or frustrated because of their 

match to reality (Hadwin & Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990; Wellman & Banerjee, 

1991; Wellman & Bartsch, 1988). In contrast, the ‘cognitive’ emotions, like surprise, 

appear to be understood only between four and eight years (Harris, Johnson, 

Hutton, Andrews, & Cooke, 1989; MacLaren & Olson, 1993). Surprise may be more 

difficult to comprehend because it is necessary to appreciate the false beliefs of 

others to recognize that they will be surprised when they become exposed to the reality 

of the situation (Hadwin & Perner, 1991). 

Questions about the main character’s emotional reaction were posed at two points 

in the complete story. They were first presented immediately after the false belief 

activity question that asked what the character thought the partner was currently 

doing. Drawings were used to determine what facial expression the children thought 

the absent character was showing: happy, sad, or angry. The same procedure was 

repeated at the end of the story when the character actually returned to find the partner 

engaged in the new activity. The emotion-related questions gave another indication 

of whether the children’s understanding of belief and desire changed their grasp 

of the social implications of the story. An understanding of both would allow the 

children to recognize that the character will become sad or angry only upon returning 

and actually seeing the change in the partner. 

The mental state findings for the social referents were again compared to those for 

physical referents. This time a wider assortment of existing false belief tasks with 

physical referents was employed. The children were again tested on false belief for 

the change in the location of an object (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). In a separate task, 

they were also tested on false belief regarding the change in the identity of an object 

(Gopnik & Astington, 1988; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987). To provide a range 



of difficulty, they were given the standard and discrepant belief tasks from Wellman 

and Bartsch (1988). These problems have children predict where a character will 

search given the character’s stated belief about the location of an object. The standard 

and discrepant belief tasks have been found to be less difficult than the false 

belief ones. If the results agree with the previous study, all four of physical referent 

tasks, including the false belief ones, should be easier than the false belief social 

activity and availability questions. 

Method 

Participants 

Another forty children from several Manhattan preschools took part in the study. 

The subjects were equally divided between 3-year-olds (14 girls and 6 boys, mean age 

= 42.6 months, range = 37 to 47 months) and 5-year-olds (9 girls and 11 boys, mean 

age = 62.52 months, range = 60 to 71 months). The group was highly diverse ethnically 

and racially. Their families were primarily middle class and were fluent in 

English. 

Materials 

The full story was enacted with the same familiar toy figures and props as before. 

Three schematic drawings of faces served as the choices for the test questions about 

emotional expression. All three drawings showed the same generic male face; only 

the facial expression varied. The happy face showed rounded and open eyes, 

stretched eyebrows, and an all-teeth, wide-mouth grin. The sad face showed 

depressed eyebrows, eyes cast downward with tears streaming down the cheeks, and 

a pouting mouth. The angry face showed clenched teeth, furrowed eyebrows, bloodshot 

eyes with enlarged pupils, and raised hair. 

General Design 

There were two categories of tasks: the social tasks, which tested false belief and 

desire using social referents, and the physical tasks, which tested standard, discrepant 

and false belief using physical objects. The social tasks were embedded in 

one long narrative about a social situation. Two counterbalanced versions that differed 

only in the characters and activities involved were administered to each participant 

in two sessions separated by approximately a week. The children were also 

given a counterbalanced presentation of the standard or discrepant belief tasks and 

one of the false belief tasks in each session. The order of all of the tasks within each 

session was randomly determined. 

Procedure 

All sessions were conducted in a private area of the child’s preschool. Two experimenters 

were present at each session. One experimenter acted out the stories for the 

child, while the other experimenter recorded the child’s responses. 

Social narrative. The first experimenter began the narrative by introducing four 

characters: Panda Bear, Smurf (plastic figure of an accordion-equipped Smurf with 



open mouth), Dog, and Smurfette (plastic figure in tennis uniform with a tennis 

racket). In the second version, the four characters were, respectively, Piglet, Bunny 

Rabbit, Blue Bear, and Billy (a nondescript stuffed animal). The remainder of the 

procedure will refer to the characters in the first version. 

In the first segment of the story, Panda Bear is looking for someone to sing with. 

The Smurf with the accordion and Dog are present. The Smurf agrees to sing with 

the Bear, and the two characters begin to sing together. After a while, the Bear says 

he must leave to go to the bathroom. Before the Bear leaves, he obtains Smurf’s 

assurance that he will wait and sing with Bear when Bear comes back. Before the 

Bear is removed, it is shown that Smurf continues to sing as he waits for Bear to 

return and join him. The Bear is then physically moved to an adjacent room in the 

preschool. The child is shown that the Bear is in the bathroom, and that the bathroom 

door is closed. 

Forced-choice and yes-no control questions were interspersed throughout the 

narrative. The forced choice options were counterbalanced across subjects and questions. 

The subject’s first answers were recorded and coded as correct or incorrect. 

However, if the subject was incorrect on any one of the control questions, the experimenter 

provided the correct information by repeating the relevant portion of the 

story and asking for the child’s response again. 

Five control questions were presented in the first segment of the story. The first 

three established the child’s understanding of the social interaction. The child was 

asked an activity control question, ‘What does Panda Bear want to do?’ an availability 

control question, ‘Who wants to sing with Panda Bear?’ and a partner control 

question, ‘Who is Panda Bear going to sing with then?’ After the Bear departed for 

the bathroom, the child was asked a second partner control question, ‘Who is Panda 

Bear going to sing with after he comes back from the bathroom?’ These questions 

were forced-choice. For questions about activity, the choice was between watching 

TV and singing songs. For questions about partner, it was between Dog and Smurf. 

Finally, the child was asked two perceptual access control questions, ‘In the bathroom, 

can Panda Bear see Smurf and Dog?’ and ‘Can he hear Smurf and Dog?’ 

In the second segment of the story, while the Bear was absent, a conversation 

between Smurf and Dog was enacted. Smurf announces that he no longer wants to 

sing with Bear. He says that he now wants to play tennis with Smurfette. After 

Smurf speaks, the Dog says he will sing with Bear when the latter returns. Two control 

questions were asked at the end of this segment. The first was, ‘Does Smurf want 

to sing with Panda Bear anymore?’ And, ‘Who wants to sing with Panda Bear now, 

Dog or Smurf?’ 

The succeeding questions were all test questions. No corrections were provided. 

The forced-choice options were again counterbalanced across subjects and questions. 

The child was initially asked a new ignorance false belief question, ‘Does 

Panda Bear know that Smurf no longer wants to sing with him?’ Next, the experimenter 

and child walked over to the bathroom location to fetch Panda Bear. The 

following test questions were then asked. The activity false belief question was given 

first, ‘What does Panda Bear think Smurf is doing right now, singing or playing tennis?’ 

It was followed by the belief-related emotion question, ‘What face does Panda 

Bear have right now?’ where the child was given the choice of the line drawings of 

the happy, angry and sad facial expressions. Finally, the past activity desire question 

was asked, ‘Before he went to the bathroom, what did Panda Bear want to do, play 

tennis or sing songs?’ 



A new character, Pinocchio, was introduced in the last segment of the story. 

Pinocchio was included to obtain the child’s reasoning about mental states without 

explicitly asking the child to focus on the character’s belief or desire. Pinocchio 

directly questions Panda Bear. The child was encouraged to say how Panda Bear 

would respond. For clarity, these questions are labeled report questions. In each, the 

child has to report what Panda Bear would say to the following four questions asked 

by Pinocchio. First was an activity false belief report question, ‘What is Smurf doing 

right now, singing songs or playing tennis?’ Next, Pinocchio asked an availability 

false belief report question of ‘Who promised to sing songs with you, Smurf or Dog?’ 

There followed a desire for activity report question, ‘What are you going to do now, 

play tennis or sing songs?’ The child’s response to the activity report question was 

then incorporated in a desire for partner report question, ‘Who are you going to [play 

tennis/sing songs] with, Dog or Smurf?’ 

Finally, the experimenter and child retrieved Panda Bear and brought him back to 

the original scene. Bear discovered that Smurf was now playing tennis with 

Smurfette. The experimenter asked the reality-related emotion question, ‘What face 

does Panda Bear have now?’ with the same choice of line drawings of the happy, 

angry and sad facial expressions as in the belief-related emotion question. 

Because the narrative was a full story, there was the possibility that parts of it or 

that some of the questions asked about it were unclear. To check the comprehensibility 

of the story and questions, the narrative was presented individually to 20 

adults and 12 6-year-olds. Both groups demonstrated an excellent understanding of 

the story and all of the questions. There were no errors among the adults. The 6year-olds 

responded above chance on every question to average 86.8% correct overall. 

Physical referent task. The standard and discrepant belief problems were taken 

from Wellman and Bartsch (1988). In each, the subject was shown two closed boxes 

(e.g., a green one and a black one) and told a story about a character who wanted to 

find a particular object. In the standard belief, the object’s actual location was not 

disclosed. The experimenter asked, ‘Joe thinks the raisins are in the green box. Joe 

doesn’t think the raisins are in the black box. Where will Joe look for the raisins, in 

the green box or in the black box?’ In the discrepant belief, each of the boxes was 

shown to contain raisins. After closing both boxes, the experimenter asked, ‘Joe 

thinks the raisins are in the green box. Where will he look for the raisins, in the green 

or in the black box?’ Assignment of the actual and believed locations to the boxes 

and the order of the tags in the questions were counterbalanced. 

The physical referent false belief tasks employed the change-in-object-location 

(Wimmer & Perner, 1983) and change-in-object-identity formats (Gopnik & 

Astington, 1988; Perner et al., 1987). The first used two boxes and several crayons. 

The child witnessed one experimenter put the crayons in one of the boxes, close it, 

and exit the room. The remaining experimenter suggested switching the crayons to 

the other box. After the crayons were moved, the child was asked: ‘When X comes 

back, where will she look for her crayons: In the blue box, or in the black box?’ Two 

control questions were asked after the test question: ‘Where are the crayons really, in 

the black box or the blue box?’ and ‘In the beginning, where did X first put her 

crayons, in the blue box or the black box?’ Initial box, side that the initial box was 

on, and order of the tags in all of the questions were counterbalanced. The second 

false belief task showed the child a magnet that looked like a package of chewing 

gum. The child was asked what the object was (all participants identified it as ‘gum’). 



The child was then allowed to see that it actually was a magnet. The ensuing test 

question was: ‘Your friend Y has never seen this. If we ask her what it is, what do 

you think Y will say? Will she say it’s gum, or will she say it’s a magnet?’ Order of 

the tags was counterbalanced. 

Results 

A comparison of the two sessions for the social desire and social false belief questions 

in the narrative revealed no differences. The scores were therefore collapsed 

across sessions. A similar comparison of the two physical referent belief tasks (simple 

with discrepant belief) and the two physical referent false belief tasks (change-inobject-identity 

with change-in-object-location) also yielded no differences. Scores 

from these tasks were therefore combined into physical standard and discrepant 

belief and physical false belief categories that were made up of two tasks each. 

Consequently, scores on all of the measures ranged from 0 to 2. 

Social Narrative 

Control questions. To verify their initial comprehension of the story, the children 

were asked to state, before any change in the social situation, whom the main character 

was going to play with and what activity he and the partner were going to play. 

The children were also asked, after the main character left for the bathroom but 

before the partner announced his change in activity, whether the character could see 

or hear the partner from the other room. Both age groups responded above chance 

to the partner and activity control questions (t’s(19) > 3.94, p’s < .05, M’s = 1.60 and 

1.65 for the 3-year-olds, and 1.65 and 1.85 for the 5-year-olds). However, on the perceptual 

access questions, a 2 (Age) � 2 (Question) repeated measures ANOVA 

revealed a main effect for age (F(1, 38) = 5.36, p < .05), favoring the 5-year-olds. 

Here, both the 3- and 5-years-olds responses were above chance on the ‘see’ perceptual 

access question (t’s(19) > 5.25, p’s < .05, M’s = 1.75 and 1.93 for the 3- and 5year-olds) 

but only the 5-year-olds were initially above chance on the ‘hear’ question 

(t’s(19) = 6.10, p < .05, M’s = 1.20 and 1.75 for the 3- and 5-year-olds). Wrong 

answers were corrected on the control questions. All of the subjects provided the 

right answers after being corrected. 

False belief questions. The false belief questions were posed after the main character 

moved to the bathroom and the partner had announced he was going to change 

activities. The children were questioned about the character’s ignorance of the partner’s 

change in availability (‘Does A know that B no longer wants to play with 

him?’), the character’s belief about the partner’s current activity (‘What does A think 

B is doing right now?’), the character’s belief, as reported to another, about the partner’s 

current activity (What does A tell Pinocchio about what B is doing?’) and the 

character’s belief, as reported to another, about which partner was available (What 

does A tell Pinocchio about who promised to play with him?’). These questions were 

analyzed in a 2 (Age) � 4 (Question) repeated measures ANOVA. This analysis 

reveal a main effect of age (F(1,38) = 18.83, p < .001) and an age-by-question interaction 

(F(3,114) = 3.44, p < .05), as shown in Figure 1. 

The interaction was decomposed by analyzing the effect of question for each age 

group separately. The 3-year-olds responded to each of the questions similarly, and 

none of their scores differed from chance. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA 



Figure 1. Mean Correct Responses (Out of 2) for the 3- and 5-Year-Olds on the Four False Belief Test 

Questions in the Social Narratives in Experiment 2. 

showed that the performance of the 5-year-olds varied as a function of question 

(F(3, 57) = 11.72, p < .001). Post hoc Scheffé tests (p’s < .05) established that the 5year-olds’ 

scores on the ignorance false belief and on availability false belief report 

were higher than on those of activity false belief and of activity false belief report. 

Only the attributions of ignorance and of false belief report of partner’s availability 

were above chance (t’s(19) > 4.76, p’s < .05). 

Desire questions. Questions that tapped into the children’s understanding of desire 

were presented at several points in the narrative. The first question was asked before 

the character left the room and before any change in the partner’s desires was 

announced. In this control question, the children were requested to state what activity 

the main character wanted to do. After the main character was put in the bathroom 

and the partner announced he wanted to play another activity, the child was 

asked the past activity desire (‘What did A want to do before he left for the bathroom?’). 

Next, they were asked the desire for activity and for partner report questions. 

In the form of statements to another character, they were asked to specify 

which activity the main character was now going to play (‘What does A tell 

Pinocchio about what he’s going to do?’) and which partner he was going to do that 

activity with (‘What does A tell Pinocchio about who he is going to play with?’). A 2 

(Age) � 4 (Question) repeated measures ANOVA revealed main effects of age 

(F(1, 38) = 15.81, p < .001) and question (F(3, 114) = 8.68, p < .001), and an age-byquestion 

interaction (F(3, 114) = 2.75, p < .05), as depicted in Figure 2. 

To interpret the interaction, the simple main effect of question was analyzed at 

each age. The performance of 3-year-olds varied as a function of question (F(3, 57) = 

6.31, p < .001). Post hoc Scheffé tests (p’s < .05) showed that the control and past 

desire questions differed from the desire for activity and desire for partner report 

questions. Responses were above chance only on the first two questions. The performance 

of 5-year-olds also varied as a function of question (F(3, 57) = 4.39, p


Figure 2. Mean Correct Responses (Out of 2) for the 3- and 5-Year-Olds on the Four Desire Questions in 

the Social Narratives in Experiment 2. 

the desire for partner report question than on the control, past desire and desire for 

activity report questions. In spite of the lower scores on the desire for partner report 

question, the 5-year-olds’ performance on all of the desire questions remained above 

chance (t’s(19) > 2.10, p’s < .05). 

Emotional expression questions. After the children answered the belief question 

about the partner’s current activity, they were asked to indicate the main character’s 

facial expression. The same question was given when the character discovered the 

change in the social situation when he returned to the room. 

If the children understood the relation between emotion and the character’s mental 

state, then they should have chosen the happy expression for the first, beliefrelated 

emotion question because the character did not know about the change in 

the situation (a change which contradicted his original desire), and sad or angry for 

the second, reality-related emotion question because now the character did know. 

Using these as the correct responses, mean scores on the belief-related and realityrelated 

questions were .88 and 1.20 for the 3-year-olds, and .90 and 1.90 for the 5year-olds. 

A 2 (Age) � 2 (Question) repeated measures ANOVA found main effects 

of age (F(1, 38) = 10.33, p < .05) and question (F(1, 38) = 11.89, p < .001). 

Inspection of the means shows that the reality-based questions produced more correct 

responses than the belief-based ones, and that the 5-year-olds performed better 

on these questions than the 3-year-olds. 

Physical Referent Tasks 

Mean scores on the combined standard and discrepant belief tasks and the combined 

false belief tasks were 1.15 and 1.05 for the 3-year-olds, and 1.50 and 1.90 for the 5year-olds. 

A 2 (Age) � 2 (Task) repeated-measures ANOVA established main effects 

of age (F(1, 38) = 11.90, p < .01) and a trend towards an age-by-task interaction 



(F(1, 38) = 3.57, p < .07). The main effect for age showed that overall the 5-year-olds 

performed better than the 3-year-olds. The marginal interaction was decomposed by 

comparing task at each of the ages separately. There was no difference for the 3year-olds. 

However, the false belief tasks were easier than the standard and discrepant 

belief tasks for the 5-year-olds (t(19) = 2.99, p < .05). Comparisons to 

chance showed that the 5-year-olds were above chance on standard and discrepant 

belief, and on false belief (t’s(19) > 3.25, p’s < .05), whereas the 3-year-olds were not 

for either. 

The poor performance of both age groups on the standard and discrepant belief 

tasks was unexpected. Given that previous research (Wellman & Bartsch, 1988) 

found that 3-year-olds successfully solve these problems, the tasks need to be 

retested in future studies. On the other hand, both physical false belief tasks conformed 

to what has been consistently documented in the literature. The 3-year-olds 

performed poorly on them, whereas the 5-year-olds were near ceiling. 

Discussion 

The second study elaborated the pattern of mental state reasoning in social situations 

and replicated the main findings of the first study. Only the 5-year-olds gave 

evidence of false belief understanding. They were nearly perfect in their attribution 

of false belief in the traditional physical tasks, but again were less successful with the 

social situation. The 5-year-olds were able to recognize that the absent character 

would be ignorant of the change in activity and would think that the original partner 

was still available to play. Nonetheless, they performed as poorly as before on the 

false belief question regarding the partner’s activity. Even when they correctly reasoned 

that the absent character would still think the original partner wanted to play, 

they mistakenly claimed that the character would know the partner’s new activity. A 

3- to 5-year age difference for desire reasoning was again found. The 3-year-olds did 

not appreciate that the absent character would still want to play the old activity with 

the old partner. In comparison, the 5-year-olds showed a good comprehension of 

desire throughout the story. The new results on the attribution of emotion confirmed 

the overall pattern for belief and desire. The 5-year-olds alone seemed to comprehend 

the relation between emotional expression and desired outcome. Only they 

recognized that the main character’s expression would not become sad or angry until 

the character actually returned to see the change in the partner’s availability. 

The new control questions helped to show that, even though the social narrative 

was more extensive, the lapses in the children’s performance were not a function of 

poor comprehension of the story or wording of the test questions. When the character 

left the room, the children were asked whether the character could see or hear the 

partner. Three-year-olds understood that the character would not be able to see, but 

were not quite above chance on the hear question. Five-year-olds’ responses were 

close to ceiling on both. They clearly understood that the character did not have perceptual 

access to the partner, and yet they still said that the absent character thought 

the partner was playing the new activity. The 5-year-olds’ failure to ascribe false 

belief regarding activity was also probably not an artifact of the form of the question. 

Some of the test questions were presented in report form in which the child had 

to indicate what the absent character would say to a third character in the story. 

This arrangement made it possible to avoid the explicit use of a mental state term. In 

the present instance, the type of the question was shown not to matter. The false 



belief activity question was asked in both ‘think’ and report form. Five-year-olds did 

not succeed with either. 

The results for the narrative gave a much more informative characterization of the 

older children’s understanding of false belief for the social situation. Exactly as in 

Experiment 1, their near perfect determination of false belief for aspects of the physical 

world did not carry over to an understanding of false belief for social activity. 

They were proficient for some of the false belief judgments in the social situation, 

however. They knew that the character should be ignorant of the change in activity 

and should not know of the brand-new partner who entered the story. Previous 

research indicates that it may be easier to understand someone’s ignorance than their 

resultant false belief (Hogrefe, Wimmer & Perner, 1986; but also see Sullivan & 

Winner, 1993), yet this possibility would not explain the success for the false belief 

about the partner’s availability. The pattern indicates again that there is a specific 

difference between mental state reasoning for social and physical situations. 

The Symons et al. (1997) findings establish that false belief in social situations is 

not difficult just because it involves understanding one person’s thoughts about 

another person. They discovered that understanding someone’s false belief for the 

location of another person was difficult only when that other person (or even animal) 

moved to the new location by their own choice. In other words, when it was 

possible to wonder what the other was doing, then false belief understanding suffered. 

The same type of effect occurred in the current study. The 5-year-olds were 

able to understand false belief for availability, or who, but not for activity, or what. 

This explanation would suggest that when the question arose of what the partner 

wanted to do (or what the character and partner could now do together), then keeping 

straight what the character thought the other was doing became much more of a 

problem. Interference from the second person’s mental states can only occur in 

social situations. This proposed account says that it is the attempt to understand the 

social aspects of the story that makes the children falter in their understanding of the 

character’s actual perspective. 

The narrative provided extensive information about how children construe desire. 

It clearly established that the 3-year-olds initially knew what the character wanted to 

do. Moreover, the change in the partner’s desired activity did not cause them to forget 

the original desire. After the change, they correctly answered the past desire 

question of what the character had wanted to do. Nonetheless, when it came time to 

state what the absent character wants to do and with whom, the 3-year-olds were 

not able to indicate that the character still wanted to play the old activity with the 

old partner. The 5-year-olds, in contrast, responded above chance to all the desire 

questions, although they were slightly better at choosing the old activity than the old 

partner as the correct answers to the questions about the character’s desires. 

The age difference in the understanding of desire again argues for a distinction 

between simple and representational desire (Astington & Gopnik, 1991; Moore et 

al., 1996; Perner, Peerbhoy, & Lichterman, 1991). It reinforces the conclusion that 3year-olds 

have difficulty understanding desires when they are in conflict, that desire 

and belief appear to develop together when they are assessed in the same way, and 

that conflicting desires are difficult even when executive function or the child’s own 

desires are not involved. The new findings from the series of desire questions eliminate 

memory as an explanation of the difficulty with conflicting desires. Three-yearolds 

knew the absent character’s original desire but nonetheless said that the 

character wanted to play the new activity as soon as the change happened. Conflicts 



in desire are a characteristic of social situations. The new findings again suggest that 

3-year-olds have difficulty appreciating that there can be conflicting desire. 

Furthermore, the pattern of responses may suggest that their failure to think about 

conflicting desires could result in what could be called social opportunism. That is, 

they may have the tendency to predict that actors, rather than maintaining their 

stated desires, will want whatever will make a social interaction take place. 

The social narrative provided the new opportunity to begin to determine how 

belief and desire understanding interrelate for social situations. The 3-year-olds’ pattern 

was altogether consistent. Their limited understanding of belief led them to conclude 

that the absent character would immediately know about any change in the 

situation. Desire functioned the same way. The children seemed to assume that the 

character’s desires would track the other changes in desire in the story. Note that 

this correspondence between belief and desire need not have occurred. The children 

could have erroneously thought that the character would know everything about the 

distant situation and nonetheless they could have decided that the character would 

continue to want to play the originally favored activity. In practice, the 3-year-olds 

acted as if both belief and desire were entirely governed by the situation. Whatever 

happened in the story, the character knew about it. Whatever advanced the social 

situation, the character wanted it. The result was a social situation that no longer 

held any conflict in mental states. 

The 5-year-olds’ pattern was more unusual. They showed a good grasp of desire. 

They understood that the absent character would continue to want to play the original, 

agreed-upon activity. To a significant degree, they also understood that the 

character would still want to play with the original partner. Because the 5-year-olds 

did not understand false belief for the partner’s activity, there is good evidence that 

their success in judging what the character would want was due to desire rather than 

belief reasoning. In other words, they did not have the advantage of understanding 

that the absent character could not know about the change in activity. They erroneously 

thought the character would know and yet they still understood that the 

character’s desires would remain the same. In contrast, belief and desire reasoning 

matched for availability. The 5-year-olds recognized that the absent character would 

not know about the new partner and would still want to play with the original one. 

A natural assumption would be that the false belief understanding made it possible 

to judge desire correctly; however, the activity results warn against adopting this 

conclusion without testing the link specifically. 

The results for the attribution of emotion give a strong confirmation of the belief 

and desire reasoning pattern. The narrative was structured so that the character 

should have shown a negative expression, sad or angry, only on the second occasion 

when the character and partner were actually reunited. The 3-year-olds did not differentiate 

between the two assessments, whereas the 5-year-olds correctly predicted a 

much more negative reaction at the end of the story. The 5-year-olds’ success 

required the understanding and coordination of both belief and desire reasoning. 

They had to appreciate the character’s false belief about the partner’s availability in 

order to understand that the negative reaction would not occur until the reunion. 

Moreover, they had to understand that the character would still have the original 

desire in order to predict a negative reaction to the discovery of the change in the 

partner’s activity. As such, it is clear that the gains in belief and desire reasoning 

allowed the 5-year-olds to have an understanding of emotions in the story that was 

consistently not accessible to the 3-year-olds. 



General Discussion 

The present studies begin to examine how developments in mental state reasoning or 

theory of mind make a difference for social understanding. Deception serves as an 

already established example of the need for this type of analysis. It stands to reason 

that children cannot understand an instance in which one person deceives another 

unless they realize that the one is acting intentionally to have the other believe something 

that is false. The current studies initiated a similar analysis for prosocial interaction 

using the example of play. Of course, children do not need to infer mental 

states in order to play together—even infants share play. However, to understand 

what play is as a social activity, children need to understand desire because play 

depends on two people wanting to share the same activity. Moreover, to understand 

the participants’ expectations, it is necessary to understand belief because an expectation 

to engage in play rests on believing that the other is willing to take part in the 

activity. 

The results of both studies showed that theory of mind in social situations is not 

identical to that found for mental states about the physical world. One implication 

of this outcome is that theory of mind research should be expanded beyond its 

almost exclusive focus on tasks involving physical change. The other is that there is 

something special about social understanding. There are many possibilities for this 

difference. It might be, for instance, that the important difference is simply that 

people are more volatile than objects. However, when seen from a social standpoint, 

the present results suggest the difference is a matter of the multiple actors, and thus 

the multiple mental states that are present in social situations. Unlike the physical 

world, there are ‘facts’ in social situations that are determined solely by the mental 

states of the participants—for example, whether two people like each other—and 

this unique characteristic seems to present an added challenge when thinking about 

mental states. 

Both age groups were influenced by the multiple mental states present. However, 

the 5-year-olds were better able to differentiate the states of the different actors, and 

so were better able to represent the social situation as it was. The 3-year-olds did not 

exhibit a good understanding of desire when the desires between the play partners no 

longer matched. It is an important methodological point that assessing desire using 

conflict is more closely matched to how belief has been assessed in the standard false 

belief tasks, and thus may provide a better comparison of the understanding of the 

two. As far as social understanding is concerned, the 3-year-olds’ pattern of desire 

reasoning resulted in a form of social opportunism in which they assumed that the 

absent character’s desires would automatically agree with the partner’s. Only the 5year-olds 

appreciated that play would not occur. They recognized that the conflict in 

desires was unresolved and were able to respect that conflict in predicting what the 

characters would do. 

In contrast to their reasoning about desire, the 5-year-olds were not immune to 

the influence of multiple mental states in judging belief. The change in the partner’s 

social activity made them conclude that the absent character would be aware of the 

new activity. Although this error looks like a persisting sign of social opportunism, it 

cannot be, given that the 5-year-olds did not expect the two to play together because 

of the conflict in desires. Whatever the specific mechanism, the poorer false belief 

results for social activity showed that the 5-year-olds had their own, unexpected way 

of viewing the social situation. Informal questioning of the adult and 6-year-old 



pilot participants indicated that their judgments tended to take the form that the 

absent character just could not know about any change in the other room no matter 

what it was. The 5-year-olds, in a way that must still be determined, continued to 

consider both the character and the partner. This attention to the current state of the 

social situation seemed to prevent them from seeing that the character simply could 

not know about the change. 

We have argued that the children’s understanding of the social situation is shaped 

by their ability to recognize the match or mismatch in the mental states of the different 

participants. It must also be acknowledged that understanding an individual’s 

social behavior involves understanding the different mental states—belief, desire, 

and emotion—of that single person. In the past, theory of mind research has tended 

to study different mental states in isolation, so that each has generated an extensive 

but separate literature of its own. Yet, at any given age, understanding children’s 

‘theory,’ or explanatory framework for behavior and mind, will necessarily require 

understanding how they expect different mental states to fit together. Intentional 

acts, for instance, require both a means and a goal, or, at some point, a belief and a 

desire. Both must be studied, therefore, to make sense of how children understand 

action, even the simple actions in the standard theory of mind tasks (Frye, 1991, 

1993). 

It would be impossible to make sense of how the children interpreted the actions 

in the social situation without looking at how they viewed belief and desire together. 

It was not that the 3-year-olds gave no attention to belief and desire. They thought 

that the play would continue precisely because they readjusted both the character’s 

belief and desire to fit the new situation. The 5-year-olds were better at maintaining 

the character’s actual belief and desires, except for the belief about social activity, 

and so were better at understanding what would actually happen in the story. Much 

of the time they were able to combine belief and desire to predict how the character 

would act. They were also able to predict the character’s emotional reaction correctly, 

and could only do so because they could consider belief in conjunction with 

desire. 

Two additional issues regarding mental state understanding in social situations 

should be mentioned. The study of theory of mind has recently been extended to 

social situations in another way. The current studies followed the change-in-location 

version of the false belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), except that here a social 

activity instead of a location of an object was switched. The other standard version 

of the false belief task relies on a change in the identity of an object (Gopnik & 

Astington, 1988; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987). It has a social analog as well. 

Peskin (1996) tested young children’s false belief understanding for a change in personal 

identity. This sort of transformation is very common in children’s stories— 

e.g., in Little Red Riding Hood—and is essential to the comprehension of the story 

itself. Peskin found that 3-year-olds did not appreciate that a character like Little 

Red Riding Hood would have a mistaken belief about the identity of the wolfdressed-as-the-grandmother. 

Interestingly, false belief for personal identity showed 

about the same age change as a change-in-object-identity task. This result would 

seem to indicate again that when the judgment is about the ‘who’ of a social situation 

then false belief is not more difficult. 

Finally, it must be emphasized that studying theory of mind in social situations 

will require additional considerations beyond children’s representational mental 

states. As Carrithers (1991) and Bruner and Feldman (1993) have argued, social 



behavior always depends not only on mental state knowledge, but also on knowledge 

about socio-cultural conventions. In other words, it involves knowledge both 

of what happens in the mind and what can be expected to happen in the social 

world. The relation may be analogous to that between mental state understanding 

and causal reasoning for the standard false belief tasks with physical referents. 

Children can only know where someone will think an object is because they also 

know the causal conditions under which the object will or will not move. Similarly, 

children would not even be able to begin to consider someone’s beliefs and desires 

about play if they did not understand that in this culture two children singing 

together constitutes as an instance of that activity. The point applies as well to false 

belief about personal identity. To understand Little Red Riding Hood, children 

must not only make sense of the false belief about grandmother’s identity, but they 

must also have a working knowledge of the cultural expectations for grandparents’ 

behavior. A full account of the development of children’s comprehension of social 

situations will depend on understanding changes in both mental state and sociocultural 

knowledge. 

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