International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Theory of Mind: development and cross-cultural variation

Journal: International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Manuscript ID IEA-1643.R3
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Wiley - Manuscript type: Entry

Date Submitted by the Author: n/a

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Complete List of Authors: Burdett, Emily; University of St Andrews, School of Psychology and
Neuroscience
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Keywords: theory of mind, children, Cognitive Anthropology

Author-supplied keywords: culture

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Abstract:
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Page 1 of 10 International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Theory of Mind: development and cross-cultural variation

Emily R. R. Burdett

School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews

errb@st-andrews.ac.uk
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Word count: 4,226

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 International Encyclopedia of Anthropology Page 2 of 10

Abstract:

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the capacity to theorize or think about the thoughts, beliefs, and desires of
others. Although research has confirmed that typically developing humans develop the capacity to
think of the thoughts and beliefs of others, the way in which ToM emerges appears to differ across
cultures. This cultural variation has led to questions about the methods and tasks used to test ToM,
whether ToM is innate and to what extent it is subject to cultural shaping, and whether the concept
of understanding the thoughts and feelings of others only applies in a Western context. These
cultural differences have implications for understanding how ToM emerges and how humans across
cultures interpret behavior.
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Page 3 of 10 International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Theory of Mind: development and cross-cultural variation

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to anticipate and predict others' behavior based on how we view
their inner thoughts and feelings. This “mind reading” or “mentalizing” capacity allows us to engage
in highly social activities such as collaborating with others, empathizing, gossiping, and playing
games. Researchers have called it “theory of mind” because mental states are not tangible and
trying to understand the thoughts and beliefs of others can be theory-like. ToM is recognized as a
universal feature in humans, meaning that all typically-developing humans develop the ability to
recognize the intentions and beliefs of others. Nevertheless, although ToM is recognized as being
one of the most important developmental achievements universally, variations exist in many
cultures. And, although there is no doubt that typically-developing people in all cultures develop an
understanding of the intentions and beliefs of others, the way that children come to think of others
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can be profoundly influenced by their culture.

The focus of this entry will be the cross-cultural variation of the development of ToM
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reasoning. The entry first describes approaches to ToM reasoning across a variety of disciplines and
research. The second section gives a brief historical account of the first methods and tasks that
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were used to assess ToM emergence and early reasoning. The third section summarizes recent
cross-cultural work. Initially researchers were confident that ToM development was a universal
phenomenon that followed a standard schedule of ontogenetic emergence in typically-developing
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children. However, these claims have been called into question following cross-cultural work that
demonstrates the diversity and variation of ToM understanding. The fourth section describes the
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implications for how cross-cultural differences and variation in ToM understanding affect how
researchers examine the development of social cognition. In the last section, future methods and
research areas are identified.

The Larger Impact of ToM

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Research examining ToM spans several decades. This research has confirmed that typically-
developing humans across the world acquire a concept or “theory” of other minds from birth to
somewhere between 5 and 7 years. This understanding of others is refined throughout adulthood,
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but the core of our ability to reason about other minds develops during this period of early
childhood. Research on ToM reasoning has made an important contribution to many fields, as ToM
is one of the most important developmental achievements for understanding social cognition.
Interest in ToM reasoning is vast and far reaching across a variety of academic and applied research.
Research has been conducted in a wide array of fields, such as developmental psychology,
anthropology, social psychology, clinical psychology, education, and comparative psychology. For
example, in the field of clinical psychology, many researchers work with individuals who may have
impaired ToM reasoning abilities, such as those individuals with autism, who have marked difficulty
taking the perspective of others. Many people with autism can struggle to understand what typically
developing people take for granted, such as reading the emotions of others, understanding sarcasm,
or knowing what a person would see from his/her vantage point. In comparative psychology,
researchers examine ToM reasoning and development in other species, such as in chimpanzees.
These researchers often take an evolutionary perspective to observe whether other species have
 International Encyclopedia of Anthropology Page 4 of 10

comparable social cognitive abilities to humans. They are interested in whether ToM is a human
universal and whether this ability is unique to humans.

Seminal Work in ToM

The term “theory-of-mind” was first used in a seminal paper by David Premack and Guy Woodruff
(1978) to refer to the cognitive ability to infer the mental states of others. The paper sparked wide
interest, and researchers began to investigate the emergence and significance of this ability. The
first empirical paper examining ToM was published by Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner in 1983.
They developed a task called a false-belief task. This task aimed to assess whether children can take
the perspective of another, especially when this person has a false belief about reality. In the typical
false-belief paradigm, children are usually asked to predict the behavior of an actor who has not
witnessed or seen a change in object location. In this classic task, Maxi puts his chocolate bar in a
cupboard in the kitchen before going out to play. While Maxi is playing outside, his mother goes
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into the kitchen and puts the chocolate bar in a different location (e.g., the refrigerator). The test
question is where will Maxi search for his chocolate bar when he returns to the kitchen. This
question can be tricky because young children have a difficult time separating their own knowledge
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of reality (e.g., that the chocolate bar is now in the refrigerator) with someone else’s knowledge (or
lack of knowledge, as in this case, Maxi should still think the chocolate bar is in the cupboard).
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Three- and four-year-old children from North America and Europe usually fail this task (e.g., saying
that Maxi will look in the refrigerator). From the age of four, children usually will say that Maxi will
look in the cupboard. That is, they will recognize that Maxi will have a mistaken belief about the
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location of the chocolate.

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Besides this type of false-belief test, known as a “change-of-location” task, a variety of tasks
have been used to examine whether children and adults have acquired an understanding of ToM.
ToM is commonly tested using tasks that examine explicit ToM, or the ability of a person to explain
and reason about the possible intentions and beliefs of another person. Another common task is the
"surprising contents" task. In this task, children are shown a commonly-known container, such as a
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cracker box, and then shown something surprising inside, such as pencils. Children are then asked
what another person, usually their mother, would think is inside the box if she came into the room
and saw the object for the first time. Three- and four-year-olds incorrectly say that their mother
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would think pencils are in the box, while five-and six-year-olds usually say that their mother would
have the false belief that crackers would be inside the box. Children pass these tasks when they
realize that another person can hold a false-belief, or a different belief than their own, and that this
belief influences their behavior. In other words, children pass the test if they say that crackers are in
the box. This response suggests that children can understand that another person would have a
false belief (e.g., Mom might think there are crackers in the box) and that this differs from their own
knowledge and perspective (e.g., they know pencils are in the box).

The tasks described above require verbal instruction, verbal responses and other skills, such
as inhibitory control and good working memory. Other versions of these tasks have been created to
try to simplify them by using less explicit and non-verbal measures. Some studies have asked
children to point to where Maxi will look instead of asking them to tell the researcher. Recent
studies have had infants watch films of the change-of-location task and researchers track the eye
movements of infants and children when Maxi walks into the room to find his chocolate. The use of
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eye-tracking allows the researcher to record the anticipatory glances of the infant or child by
tracking where their eyes move in anticipation of where Maxi would look for his chocolate bar.
Tracking eye movements and asking children to point are examples of implicit theory-of-mind tasks.
These tasks are nonverbal and the assumption is that they allow researchers to measure children’s
implicit, or automatic, understanding of another’s behavior (and mind). Results suggest that very
young children correctly anticipate that Maxi would have a false belief that the chocolate bar was
located in the cupboard. However, when the same children are asked to indicate verbally where
Maxi will look for his chocolate bar, they fail this explicit test. Newer research is examining why
younger children consistently pass these implicit ToM tests but fail more explicit ToM tests at a later
age. A discussion of this debate is taken up later in this entry.

Cross-cultural Variation of ToM Understanding

Both Premack and Woodruff (1978) and Wimmer and Perner’s (1983) papers ignited academic
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interest in ToM reasoning and hundreds of papers ensued. Throughout the first decade following
these studies, other experimental work in North America and Europe confirmed that by age 5 or 6
years, children pass false-belief tests at above-chance levels. However, the first cross-cultural and
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non-Western examination of the emergence of ToM was not conducted until 1991, when Jeremy
Avis and Paul Harris adapted culturally-appropriate false-belief tasks for Baka children from
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Cameroon, West Africa. In this study they conducted an adapted change-of-location task and used
mango kernels in a cooking pot that were then moved to a cooking bowl. Similar to prior studies of
children from North America and Europe, by age five Baka children passed the false-belief task
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reliably. The authors suggested that ToM development in childhood was universal.
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There have been many cross-cultural studies since Avis and Harris (1991) published this
study. Some of these studies have confirmed that there is developmental synchrony across diverse
cultures in the age that children develop an understanding of ToM. For example, in a large cross-
cultural study, children from Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand showed the same
developmental trend of acquiring ToM understanding as the Baka children and children from North
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America and Northern Europe (Callaghan et al. 2005). General results from these cross-cultural
studies demonstrate that children develop an understanding of others in consistent ways: young
children fail these more explicit tasks initially but, as they get older, they consistently appreciate that
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other people can hold different knowledge states and can have false beliefs. Nevertheless, despite
the developmental pattern being the same across cultures (e.g., consistently failing these tasks to
consistently passing), other studies reveal there is cross-cultural variation in the age at which
children come to have a mature understanding of ToM.

Several new studies in anthropology and developmental psychology have aimed to chart
and account for the diversity and variation in the development of ToM across cultures. In an
influential meta-analyses, Henry Wellman and his colleagues (Wellman, Cross, and Watson 2001)
examined over 170 developmental research articles of children’s performance on ToM tasks.
Children were from Asia, Australia, North America, and Europe. These studies showed a similar
trajectory of improvement of ToM and eventual success at false-belief tasks, but the onset and
emergence of ToM revealed differences among countries. For example, the average age at which
the sample of Japanese children reliably exhibited false-belief understanding was around 5 years,
while in other countries it was between 3 and 4 years.
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This first meta-analysis largely focused on North American, Australian, and European
children with only three studies from Asia and one from Africa. A second meta-analysis with
children from Hong Kong, China, and North America, showed that acquisition of a robust
understanding of ToM, as indicated by passing false-belief tasks, occurred on average in children
from Hong Kong almost 2 years later than children from North America and China (Liu et al. 2008).
This difference is intriguing as children from Hong Kong and China share many similar socio-cultural
traditions.

Differences in findings cross-culturally may, to some degree, reflect methodological

differences. For example, the way in which experimental questions are phrased can have a large
effect on children's responses. ToM and false-belief tasks are, by their nature, very difficult tasks. If
the questions are confusing, or phrased (and translated) in a way that is confusing, children’s
responses may reflect misunderstanding of the question rather than a delay in understanding false-
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beliefs. Another aspect to consider is how culturally relevant the materials in the studies are. Using
a cracker box in a rural village in Asia with people who have never seen crackers or the product
advertised on the box, might lead to obvious difficulties in understanding the true or false contents
of the box.
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Beyond methodological issues, differences in the onset of ToM may reflect true differences
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in perception of other minds because of the cultural context. Many anthropologists have observed
considerable cultural diversity in how people conceive of the mind and talk about the mental world.
For example, children and adults from the South Pacific and Melanesia often say they do not know
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what another person is thinking unless that person speaks out loud. This difficulty in reading
another person’s thoughts is known as “opacity of mind.” Although a person may have implicit
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thoughts about the intentions of others, these particular cultural communities discourage making
these thoughts explicit. The question, then, is whether this situation affects ToM reasoning. In
other words, when a participant responds by saying he/she would not know if another person would
think an object was in a certain location, does the participant have difficulty thinking of others
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thoughts (i.e., “opacity of mind” influences their ability to reason about other minds) or is the
participant responding that he/she genuinely could not know another’s thoughts (i.e., expressing the
convention of “opacity of mind”)? Although the cultural norm may be to presume that one cannot
know another’s thoughts, it would be hard to imagine that a person from Melanesia, for example,
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would not be able to understand the intentions of a person who had their arm outstretched toward
an out-of-reach object. He or she would likely understand that the person wants this object. Even
young infants across cultures have been known to understand this type of behavior. Nevertheless,
children who are not exposed to talk of mental states do not fare as well on false-belief tasks as
those children who have been exposed to talk of mental states. The apparent delayed onset of ToM
reasoning in these cultures may not reflect a lack of understanding about others' thoughts but rather
a lack of experience or vocabulary to discuss the mental states of others.

Many studies have shown that early talk of mental states is important for ToM
development. Language can be normative as it can structure thoughts through syntax (e.g., the rules
that structure sentences), and the choice of vocabulary (e.g., mental-state words). Anthropologists
have documented that the Urapmin in Papua New Guinea rarely talk of mental states and do not
have words for certain actions like “promise” or “lie.” In another example, a recent study examined
how ToM understanding develops in a group of Nicaraguan deaf children, who did not have an
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official sign language (Pyers and Senghas 2009). The researchers examined how children and adults
communicate and think about mental states when there is no adopted language. This deaf
community was in the process of creating their own sign language and the language was continuing
to evolve and become more complex. Researchers gave deaf children and adults an adapted false-
belief task to test whether vocabulary and experience affected their ability to reason in these tasks.
Only those participants who knew the signs and vocabulary for “think” and “know” passed the false-
belief task. However, when tested two years later, the group of participants that originally did not
know the signs for “think” and “know” had meanwhile acquired and developed an understanding of
mental state words and their performance on false-belief tests was equivalent to the group that
knew mental state words two years previously. Although it is likely that the adults who did not pass
this task can think of the thoughts and beliefs of others, this study demonstrates that language plays
a pivotal role in reasoning about false-belief understanding as well as the ability to express
knowledge about mental states.
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The diversity in ToM reasoning may be attributed to differences in so-called collectivist and
Eastern cultural groups compared to individualist and Western cultural groups. Although these
descriptions of cultures are broad generalizations, collectivist cultures are generally characterized by
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their greater emphasis on inter-relational behavior and group harmony as compared to individualist
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cultures, which value personal autonomy and independence. A recent study examined differences in
ToM development in Iranian and Australian children (Shahaeian et al. 2014), finding that Iranian
children were more likely to succeed in ToM tests that demonstrated knowledge access and
understanding of sarcasm than their Australian counterparts. The interpretation given is that
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collectivist cultures, such as in Iran, value intergroup harmony and children and adults need to be
able to express views that preserve agreement. Such harmony is often achieved by avoiding overt
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disagreement and, for example, expressing a view subtly or with sarcasm. In contrast to Iranian
children, Australian children performed better in ToM tests that examined diverse beliefs. Western
and individualistic societies are said to value individual opinion and plain speaking. If this is the case,
Australian children might be encouraged generally to appreciate that others can hold different
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viewpoints. In another study, Japanese children were given a false-belief task and asked to justify
their responses (Naito and Koyama 2006). Japanese children passed the false-belief tasks between 5
and 7 years, much later than North American and European children. The justifications that
Japanese children provided highlighted relational/interpersonal or situational factors, such as
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emphasizing that Maxi promised she would put the chocolate in a different place or talking about
the object’s initial location, instead of emphasizing Maxi’s mental states or that she might hold a
false-belief. Even so, when Japanese children are asked to point to where Maxi will look for her
chocolate, they give the same response as Western children, and point to where the chocolate
initially was before the change of location.

ToM understanding can also vary intra-culturally. As the research above suggests, language
can have an influence how children and adults conceptualize the mind and the intentions of others.
Family size and number of siblings can also have a large impact. For example, children who have
several siblings and are from larger families are more likely to develop an understanding of false-
beliefs and intentions earlier than children from smaller families. Also, children who speak more
than one language are more likely to develop ToM earlier than children who are monolingual.
Bilingual children may have an advantage over monolingual children as they have been shown to be
more sensitive to linguistic differences.
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The relationship between culture and ToM development is complex. Research is still just
beginning to identify how culture influences mental state understanding and reasoning. The next
section discusses implications of culturally variable ToM development. These variations relate to
questions about the universality of ToM, whether it is innate, and how much of ToM development is
culturally driven.

Core Debate: Are the Processes involved in ToM Development Universal or Variable?

As has been noted above, ToM is a universal aspect of human cognition. Children’s intuitive
understanding of psychology, or “folk” or “naïve” psychology, allows them to understand the mental
states underlying the behavior of others. Many researchers have come to see ToM (and other areas
of cognition, such as how we acquire core knowledge about physical things or biology) as domain-
specific, or a very specialized reasoning device. These domain-specific capacities emerge early and
require minimal learning. Yet, anthropological accounts and cross-cultural work have shown
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variations in the age at which ToM emerges and how children reason about other minds. This
discrepancy brings to the fore a core debate about how innate processes and cultural input interact
in the development of ToM. The domain-general view argues that ToM understanding is
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environmentally and culturally-driven with diverse cultural groups developing ToM on a different
schedule.
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Explicit theory-of-mind tests have shown that, across the world, children develop an
understanding of false-beliefs somewhere in the time frame of 4 to 7 years. However, recent
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implicit tests suggest that ToM understanding may emerge earlier. Infant studies have
demonstrated that infants can understand that other people behave intentionally toward a goal and
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that they can predict the behavior of another individual. Using eye-tracking equipment to anticipate
where infants will look in the change-of-location task, other studies have shown that very young
children (children between the ages of 1 year and 3 years) can anticipate where Maxi will look for
her chocolate. It is argued that the infants anticipate where Maxi will look even when Maxi’s belief
is mismatched with their own beliefs. The researchers claim that false-belief understanding emerges
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much earlier in development than originally thought and that more explicit tasks test not just ToM,
but also children’s executive functioning, or how well children can control, manipulate, process and
act on new information. In a recent cross-cultural study using implicit measures, Clark Barrett and
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colleagues (2013) found that false-belief understanding emerged similarly among 2- to 5-year-old
children in Ecuador, China, and Fiji, and similar to their Western counterparts.

Questions of whether some component of ToM is innate and domain-specific and whether
infants understand the thoughts and intentions of others remain controversial. It may be the case
that implicit ToM tests examine only a low-level understanding of ToM and advanced understanding
comes with development of related aspects of cognition and experience.

Future Directions in Research, Theory, and Methodology

Over the past few decades, ToM development has been one of the most thoroughly researched
aspects of cognitive development. Although researchers have gained a rich understanding of ToM
abilities, much more is needed to understand how they emerge and develop. More and more fields
of study have recognized the need to explore non-“WEIRD” (i.e., western, educated, industrialized,
rich, democratic) groups of people, in particular (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010).
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One current trend is to use the theory-of-mind scale developed by Wellman and colleagues
(Wellman and Liu 2004). This scale includes a subset of 7 tasks that range from testing children’s
ability to detect sarcasm, false beliefs, desires, and diverse beliefs, to whether a child can tell
whether one person has gained knowledge, and whether people have hidden emotions. Studies
using this scale have shown that children in different cultures master some of these tasks in a
different sequence. This scale is particularly helpful in assessing the variation in the development of
children’s ToM development across cultures.

A related area of current research is exploring cultural influences on children’s developing

conceptualizations of diverse agents. Family pets, for example, can give children rich experience
with non-human agents. Children are also widely exposed to invisible and fantastical cultural agents
such as the tooth fairy, angels, Santa Claus, and God. These cultural agents are ubiquitous in
literature and religion. Research is showing that very young children are flexible in their
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understanding of different kinds of agents (e.g., all-knowing agents) and children in many cultural
groups develop an understanding of these agents' behaviors and mental states at around the same
time that they develop ToM for humans (Lane, Wellman, and Evans 2010, Barrett, Richert, and
Driesenga 2001).
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Future research should further examine both macro- and micro-cultural influences on ToM
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development. As mentioned above, various factors, such as family size, language, communication
style, and cultural norms (e.g., opacity of mind), play a key role in the emergence of ToM. Such
research will be important to assess in greater detail the influences that impact ToM emergence and
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development across cultures.

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SEE ALSO: Cognition; Cognitive universality and diversity; Theory of mind in primates and humans:
comparative evolution
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 International Encyclopedia of Anthropology Page 10 of 10

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Suggested Readings

Lillard, Angeline. 1998. "Ethnopsychologies: Cultural variations in theories of mind." Psychological

Bulletin no. 123:3-32. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.123.1.3.
Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2011. "Towards an anthropological theory of mind." Journal of the Finnish
Anthropological Society no. 36:5-13.
Slaughter, V., and D. Perez-Zapata. 2014. "Cultural Variations in the Development of Mind Reading."
Child Development Perspectives no. 8 (4):237-241. doi: 10.1111/cdep.12091.