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ABSTRACT-Assessing what other people know and believe is critical for accurately understanding human action. Young children find it difficult to reason about false beliefs (i.e., beliefs that conflict with reality). The source of this difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Here we show that if sensitive-enough measures are used, adults show deficits in a false-belief task similar to one used with young children. In particular, we show a curse-of-knowledge bias in false-belief reasoning. That is, adults' own knowledge of an event's outcome can compromise their ability to reason about another person's beliefs about that event. We also found that adults' perception of the plausibility of an event mediates the extent of this bias. These findings shed light on the factors involved in false-belief reasoning and are discussed in light of their implications for both adults' and children's social cognition.Reasoning about what other people believe is often essential for predicting and interpreting human action. A wealth of research has investigated children's appreciation that the mind can misrepresent reality-that is, their appreciation that people can hold false beliefs. Most research on children's false-belief reasoning has utilized some variant of the displacement task (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985;Wimmer & Perner, 1983). For example, subjects are told a story about Sally, who puts her candy in a box and leaves the room. In her absence, another character moves the candy to a basket. When Sally returns, where will she look for her candy? The right answer, that she will look in the box, requires attributing a false belief to Sally. Fouryear-olds tend to do fairly well at such tasks, but younger children tend to fail (see Wellman, Cross, & Watson's, 2001, meta-analysis). Younger children tend to answer in accord with their own knowledge, saying that Sally will think the candy is in the basket.The source of children's difficulty is a matter of considerable debate. Some researchers interpret children's difficulties on these tasks as reflecting a conceptual deficit: Perhaps young children lack a concept of belief or a concept of mental representation more generally (e.g., Gopnik, 1993;Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987;Wellman, 1990;Wellman et al., 2001). An alternative view is that young children's problems are due to more general cognitive factors such as memory and processing limitations, and thus not necessarily indicative of a conceptual limitation (e.g., Fodor, 1992;German & Leslie, 2000;Leslie, 1987;Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Roth & Leslie, 1998;Zaitchik, 1990; for a discussion, see Bloom & German, 2000).According to one version of this alternative, children have the same bias in perspective taking as adults, only to a greater extent. In earlier work (Birch & Bloom, 2003), we showed that 3-and 4-year-olds are more susceptible than 5-year-olds to a cognitive bias found in adults, the curse of knowledge (see also Bernstein, Atance, Loftus, & Meltzoff, 2004;Pohl & Haracic, 2005). We adopted this term f...

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Detecting dominance relationships, within and across species, provides a clear fitness advantage because this ability helps individuals assess their potential risk of injury before engaging in a competition. Previous research has demonstrated that 10- to 13-mo-old infants can represent the dominance relationship between two agents in terms of their physical size (larger agent = more dominant), whereas younger infants fail to do so. It is unclear whether infants younger than 10 mo fail to represent dominance relationships in general, or whether they lack sensitivity to physical size as a cue to dominance. Two studies explored whether infants, like many species across the animal kingdom, use numerical group size to assess dominance relationships and whether this capacity emerges before their sensitivity to physical size. A third study ruled out an alternative explanation for our findings. Across these studies, we report that infants 6–12 mo of age use numerical group size to infer dominance relationships. Specifically, preverbal infants expect an agent from a numerically larger group to win in a right-of-way competition against an agent from a numerically smaller group. In addition, this is, to our knowledge, the first study to demonstrate that infants 6–9 mo of age are capable of understanding social dominance relations. These results demonstrate that infants’ understanding of social dominance relations may be based on evolutionarily relevant cues and reveal infants’ early sensitivity to an important adaptive function of social groups.

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