Outcome Knowledge and False Belief

Political polarization: a curse of knowledge?

Purpose

Could the curse of knowledge influence how antagonized we are towards political outgroups? Do we assume others know what we know but still disagree with us? This research investigates how the curse of knowledge may affect us politically, i.e., be a cause of political polarization.

Background

Research on the curse of knowledge has shown that even when people are incentivized to act as if others do not know what they know, they are still influenced by the knowledge they have.

Methods

This study consists of five studies consisting of both experimental and non-experimental and within- and between-subjects survey designs. Each study collected samples of 152-1,048.

Results

Partisans on both sides overestimate the extent to which stories from their news sources were familiar to contrapartisans. Introducing novel, unknown facts to support their political opinion made participants rate political outgroup members more negatively. In an experimental design, there was no difference in judging an opponent who did not know the same issue-relevant facts and someone who did know the same facts. However, when asked to compare those who know to those who do not, participants judged those who do not know more favorably, and their ratings of all issue-opponents were closer to those issue-opponents who shared the same knowledge. In a debiasing experiment, those who received an epistemological treatment judged someone who disagreed more favorably.

Conclusion

This research provides evidence that the curse of knowledge may be a contributing cause of affective political polarization.

The "curse of knowledge" when predicting others' knowledge

To succeed in a social world, we must be able to accurately estimate what others know. For example, teachers must anticipate student knowledge to plan lessons and communicate effectively. Yet one's own knowledge consistently contaminates estimates about others' knowledge. We examine how one's knowledge influences the calibration and resolution of participants' estimates of novices' knowledge. Across four experiments, participants studied trivia questions and estimated the percentage of novice participants who would know the answer across multiple study/estimation rounds. When participants were required to answer the question before estimating what novices would know, studying the facts impaired both the calibration and resolution of the estimates. Studying the facts reduced the validity of one's experiences for predicting novices' knowledge, and estimators utilized their own experiences less when predicting novices' knowledge as they studied. Experimentally reducing reliance on one's own knowledge did not improve the accuracy of estimates. The results suggest that learning impairs the accuracy of judgments of others' knowledge, not because estimators rely too heavily on their own experiences, but because estimators lack diagnostic cues about others' knowledge.

Sources of Cognitive Conflict and Their Relevance to Theory-of-Mind Proficiency in Healthy Aging: A Preregistered Study

Age-related decline in theory of mind (ToM) may be due to waning executive control, which is necessary for resolving conflict when reasoning about other individuals' mental states. We assessed how older (n = 50) and younger (n = 50) adults were affected by three theoretically relevant sources of conflict within ToM: competing self-other perspectives, competing cued locations, and outcome knowledge. We examined which best accounted for age-related difficulty with ToM. Our data show unexpected similarity between age groups when people are representing a belief incongruent with their own. Individual differences in attention and response speed best explained the degree of conflict experienced through incompatible self-other perspectives. However, older adults were disproportionately affected by managing conflict between cued locations. Age and spatial working memory were most relevant for predicting the magnitude of conflict elicited by conflicting cued locations. We suggest that previous studies may have underestimated older adults' ToM proficiency by including unnecessary conflict in ToM tasks.

Are the classic false belief tasks cursed? Young children are just as likely as older children to pass a false belief task when they are not required to overcome the curse of knowledge

The question of when children understand that others have minds that can represent or misrepresent reality (i.e., possess a 'Theory of Mind') is hotly debated. This understanding plays a fundamental role in social interaction (e.g., interpreting human behavior, communicating, empathizing). Most research on this topic has relied on false belief tasks such as the 'Sally-Anne Task', because researchers have argued that it is the strongest litmus test examining one's understanding that the mind can misrepresent reality. Unfortunately, in addition to a variety of other cognitive demands this widely used measure also unnecessarily involves overcoming a bias that is especially pronounced in young children-the 'curse of knowledge' (the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when considering less-informed perspectives). Three- to 6-year-old's (n = 230) false belief reasoning was examined across tasks that either did, or did not, require overcoming the curse of knowledge, revealing that when the curse of knowledge was removed three-year-olds were significantly better at inferring false beliefs, and as accurate as five- and six-year-olds. These findings reveal that the classic task is not specifically measuring false belief understanding. Instead, previously observed developmental changes in children's performance could be attributed to the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge. Similarly, previously observed relationships between individual differences in false belief reasoning and a variety of social outcomes could instead be the result of individual differences in the ability to overcome the curse of knowledge, highlighting the need to re-evaluate how best to interpret large bodies of research on false belief reasoning and social-emotional functioning.

Only Familiar Information is a "Curse": Children's Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge.

A 'curse of knowledge' in the absence of knowledge? People misattribute fluency when judging how common knowledge is among their peers

Knowledge can be a curse: Once we have acquired a particular item of knowledge it tends to bias, or contaminate, our ability to reason about a less informed perspective (referred to as the 'curse of knowledge' or 'hindsight bias'). The mechanisms underlying the curse of knowledge bias are a matter of great import and debate. We highlight two mechanisms that have been proposed to underlie this bias-inhibition and fluency misattribution. Explanations that involve inhibition argue that people have difficulty fully inhibiting or suppressing the content of their knowledge when trying to reason about a less informed perspective. Explanations that involve fluency misattribution focus on the feelings of fluency with which the information comes to mind and the tendency to misattribute the subjective feelings of fluency associated with familiar items to the objective ease or foreseeability of that information. Three experiments with a total of 359 undergraduate students provide the first evidence that fluency misattribution processes are sufficient to induce the curse of knowledge bias. These results add to the literature on the many manifestations of the curse of knowledge bias and the many types of source misattributions, by revealing their role in people's judgements of how common, or widespread, one's knowledge is. The implications of these results for cognitive science and social cognition are discussed.

Perspectives on Perspective Taking: How Children Think About the Minds of Others

Perspective taking, or "theory of mind," involves reasoning about the mental states of others (e.g., their intentions, desires, knowledge, beliefs) and is called upon in virtually every aspect of human interaction. Our goals in writing this chapter were to provide an overview of (a) the research questions developmental psychologists ask to shed light on how children think about the inner workings of the mind, and (b) why such research is invaluable in understanding human nature and our ability to interact with, and learn from, one another. We begin with a brief review of early research in this field that culminated in the so-called litmus test for a theory of mind (i.e., false-belief tasks). Next, we describe research with infants and young children that created a puzzle for many researchers, and briefly mention an intriguing approach researchers have used to attempt to "solve" this puzzle. We then turn to research examining children's understanding of a much broader range of mental states (beyond false beliefs). We briefly discuss the value of studying individual differences by highlighting their important implications for social well-being and ways to improve perspective taking. Next, we review work illustrating the value of capitalizing on children's proclivity for selective social learning to reveal their understanding of others' mental states. We close by highlighting one line of research that we believe will be an especially fruitful avenue for future research and serves to emphasize the complex interplay between our perspective-taking abilities and other cognitive processes.

Social Competence in Children with Borderline Intellectual Functioning: Delayed Development of Theory of Mind Across All Complexity Levels

Borderline intellectual functioning (BIF) is characterized by heterogeneous cognitive difficulties, with an intelligence quotient (IQ) between 70 and 85 points, and a failure to meet the developmental and sociocultural standards for personal independence and social responsibility required in daily life. The fact that this population still remain a marginal clinical category, with no ad hoc diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, has stimulated the present research. Our goal was to study children with BIF investigating the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) as a pillar of social competence. Children with BIF (N = 28, 16 male/12 female, and mean age 9.46 ± 1.26 years) and children with typical development (TD; N = 31, 17 male/14 female; mean age 8.94 years ± 0.99) underwent a neurocognitive assessment and a ToM assessment. Children with BIF showed a significant lower performance across all the levels of ToM development investigated compared to the control group, and a correlation between executive functions and the advanced levels of ToM reasoning. These results constitute a first step in the direction of defining the clinical profile of children with BIF concerning ToM development, opening the way to future interventions in order to support the developmental evolution of this population in an adaptive direction.