Results from 4 experiments and an analysis in which all data from 444 English and Japanese children are pooled show (a) a linear increase in understanding false belief with the number of older siblings, (b) no such effect for children younger than 3 years 2 months, (c) no helpful effect of younger siblings at any age (despite the large sample), (d) no effect of siblings' gender, and (e) no helpful effect of siblings on a task measuring children's understanding of how they know something. Discussion involves speculation about how older siblings may assist children (e.g., through pretend play and mental state language) and how different aspects of a theory of mind may develop through different means.

Three experiments investigated the development of Japanese children’s false-belief understanding. In Experiment 1, children’s mastery of two standard false-belief tasks was considerably later and slower than typically reported, with the full development between 6 and 7 years. Experiments 2 and 3 tested Japanese 6-to 8-year-olds on interpersonal transfer tasks where a relocated item was a person who changed locations with and without their own intention. Children’s judgments on the main character’s belief about this person’s whereabouts were not influenced by the protagonists’ different mental states included in the tasks; children’s justifications referred not to the people’s belief or desire but primarily to their behaviors and social rules. Results suggest that Japanese children show not only a delay in false-belief understanding but a cultural difference in reasoning about human action as attributing it to behavioral and situational cues, rather than to individuals’ mental states.

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To investigate the relation between cognitive and affective social understanding, Japanese 4- to 8-year-olds received tasks of first- and second-order false beliefs and prosocial and self-presentational display rules. From 6 to 8 years, children comprehended display rules, as well as second-order false belief, using social pressures justifications decreasingly and motivational justifications with embedded perspectives increasingly with age. Although not related to either type of display across ages, second-order tasks were associated with both types of display tasks only at 8 years when examined in each age group. Results suggest that children base their second-order theory of mind and display rules understanding on distinct reasoning until middle childhood, during which time the originally distinct aspects of social understanding are integrated.