Fluency misattribution and auditory hindsight bias

Perspective-taking and hindsight bias: When the target is oneself and/or a peer

President Trump reacted to a reporter's query about the coronavirus outbreak by stating that the reporter was a "lousy journalist", underscoring the importance of perspective-taking in social exchanges. Egocentrism is the belief that others share the same perspective as your own and hampers the perspective-taking of another naive person. An issue is whether it is seen in hindsight bias where we overestimate what we knew beforehand. Via a foreseeability-inevitability platform, participants were randomly assigned to make self-judgments for problem-solving from a foresight (no answers) or three hindsight (answers) conditions. In two hindsight conditions, participants were asked to ignore or not to ignore the answers. In the last condition, participants predicted for an unfamiliar peer asked to ignore the answers. Next, all participants made judgments again from the perspective of the peer. Predominately in hindsight, participants showed significant changes responding but with an appropriate baseline comparison showed essentially the same hindsight bias in judgments for themselves and the peer. Ignoring or not ignoring the answers produced the same outcome. This sharing of perspective-taking dovetails with individuals' believing their hindsight knowledge is commonly present among others. Although participants in hindsight believed their foreseeable predictions for the peer were more accurate or realistic, it was more challenging to predict for the peer than themselves. Implications for individuals' judgments about Donald Trump 's decision-making for COVID-19 are discussed. Researchers should examine perspective-taking in hindsight bias as everyday social interaction involves reasoning about others.

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.