Knowledge and Belief Understanding Among Iranian and Australian Preschool Children

Abstract

For more than three decades, considerable research effort has been expended in documenting children's development of a theory of mind (ToM), or the recognition that behavior is determined by mental states. Studies comparing ToM development in children from Western and non-Western countries have shown differences in patterns of development in various ToM tasks. Specifically, Iranian children are slower than their Australian counterparts to acknowledge that people have diverse beliefs, but at the same time they have relatively advanced understanding of how people acquire new knowledge. In the current study, our aim was to further investigate this cross-cultural pattern by evaluating 3-and 4-year-old Australian and Iranian children's belief and knowledge understanding across a range of distinct tasks designed to reflect culturally familiar situations. Results confirmed that the Iranian children were faster than the Australians in mastering tasks assessing the understanding of how and when knowledge is acquired. Iranian children, however, lag behind in passing diverse belief tasks. Scores in false belief tasks were comparable across both countries. These findings are discussed with reference to socio-cultural differences across the two countries.

Towards a Cognitive Science of the Human: Cross-Cultural Approaches and Their Urgency

“…Another thread of CCCS work on interpersonal cognition concerns how we make inferences about others' inner lives, including their thoughts, emotions, and motivations. This includes work on facial, vocal, and other expressions of emotion [59][60][61][62][63][64] and work on 'mindreading', or 'ToM', the ability to infer and react to others' mental states via their observable behavior [26,[65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73]. Here again, cognition is organized as variations on a theme: emotion reading and mindreading develop in most neurotypical individuals, but there are cross-cultural differences in how the domain of emotions is parsed, linguistically, and how ToM is used in everyday cognition, including moral judgment (Box 2).…”

Understanding individual differences in theory of mind via representation of minds, not mental states

“…Such evidence has been used to support the idea that certain types of mental state are more difficult to represent than others. However, the order in which different types of mental state are understood varies across cultures, for instance children in Iran and China tend to understand the relationship between seeing and knowing before appreciating that people can have diverse beliefs, whereas the reverse order is observed in children from Australia and the USA (Shahaeian, Nielsen, Peterson, & Slaughter, 2014a; Shahaeian, Nielsen, Peterson, Aboutalebi, & Slaughter, 2014b; Shahaeian et al, 2011; Slaughter & Perez-Zapata, 2014; Wellman et al, 2006, 2011). This makes it likely that the order in which children understand different types of mental state may instead depend on environmental factors such as when they are taught about each type of mental state (Heyes & Frith, 2014), rather than providing any explanation of, or justification for, differential difficulty of mental state representation (Conway & Bird, 2018; Bird, 2017).…”

Cultural Variations in the Development of Mind Reading

“…In two studies comparing mind-reading development in children from Australia and Iran, Iranian preschoolers, like their Chinese counterparts, reliably mastered knowledge access prior to diverse belief (as depicted in the rightmost column of Table 1). In addition, Iranian 3-to 4-year-olds outpaced their Australian counterparts not only on the knowledge access test described in Table 1, but on other mind-reading tests that assess understanding of how people come to know things, namely, identifying how and when something is learned (Shahaeian, Nielsen, Peterson, Aboutalebi, & Slaughter, 2014). These findings support the idea that collectivist cultures, which focus on respect for traditional wisdom and practices while de-emphasizing interpersonal conflict, shape children's early mastery of these mind-reading concepts.…”

“…Asterisks (*) denote cultural group with a significantly higher passing rate on the task. FromShahaeian, Nielsen, Peterson, Aboutalebi, and Slaughter (2014).…”