scholarly journals Dogs follow human misleading suggestions more often when the informant has a false belief

2021 ◽  
Vol 288 (1955) ◽  
pp. 20210906
Author(s):  
Lucrezia Lonardo ◽  
Christoph J. Völter ◽  
Claus Lamm ◽  
Ludwig Huber
Keyword(s):  
Canis Familiaris ◽  
Experimental Manipulation ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Pet Dogs ◽  
Primate Lineage ◽  
Location Task

We investigated whether dogs ( Canis familiaris ) distinguish between human true (TB) and false beliefs (FB). In three experiments with a pre-registered change of location task, dogs ( n = 260) could retrieve food from one of two opaque buckets after witnessing a misleading suggestion by a human informant (the ‘communicator’) who held either a TB or a FB about the location of food. Dogs in both the TB and FB group witnessed the initial hiding of food, its subsequent displacement by a second experimenter, and finally, the misleading suggestion to the empty bucket by the communicator. On average, dogs chose the suggested container significantly more often in the FB group than in the TB group and hence were sensitive to the experimental manipulation. Terriers were the only group of breeds that behaved like human infants and apes tested in previous studies with a similar paradigm, by following the communicator's suggestion more often in the TB than in the FB group. We discuss the results in terms of processing of goals and beliefs. Overall, we provide evidence that pet dogs distinguish between TB and FB scenarios, suggesting that the mechanisms underlying sensitivity to others' beliefs have not evolved uniquely in the primate lineage.

Development of Preschoolers' Emotion and False Belief Understanding: A Longitudinal Study

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifang Wang ◽  
Hongyun Liu ◽  
Yanjie Su
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Developmental Trajectories ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
False Belief ◽  
First Year ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Location Task ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Developmental Relationship ◽  
Time Point

To explore the developmental trajectory of emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and false belief understanding (an unexpected-location and an unexpected-contents task), we measured the performance of 3- and 4-year-olds 4 times at approximately half-yearly intervals. The results indicated that the children's ability to understand emotions and false beliefs increased significantly at each time point in the first year and a half, but no significant increases were found in the last 6 months. The developmental trajectories of the understanding of emotions and false beliefs were similar during the 2 years, however, the developing track of the emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, and anger were different. Understanding of happiness developed earlier and faster than understanding of sadness, fear, and anger. In regard to understanding false beliefs, the children performed better in the unexpected-contents task than in the unexpected-location task. We found that a developmental relationship existed between emotion and false belief understanding.

scholarly journals Process in the Community, Detain Offshore or ‘Turn Back the Boats’? Predicting Australian Asylum-seeker Policy Support from False Beliefs, Prejudice and Political Ideology

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 562-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa K Hartley ◽  
Joel R Anderson ◽  
Anne Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Hierarchical Regression ◽  
Future Research ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Predictive Role ◽  
Practical Implications

Abstract Over the past few decades, there has been a progressive implementation of policies designed to deter the arrival of people seeking protection. In Australia, this has included offshore processing and towing boats of asylum seekers away from Australian waters. In a community survey of 164 Australians, this study examined the predictive role of false beliefs about asylum seekers, prejudice and political ideology in support of three policies. Multiple hierarchical regression models indicated that, although political ideology and prejudice were significant predictors of policy support, false beliefs was the strongest predictor. For the policy of processing asylum seekers in the community, less endorsement of false beliefs was a significant predictor, while, for the policy of offshore processing, more endorsement of false beliefs was a significant predictor. For the boat turn-back policy, an increase in false-belief endorsement was the strongest predictor; although increases in prejudice and a prejudice–political ideology interaction (i.e. the predictive value of prejudice was stronger for participants who identified as politically conservative) also independently predicted support. Practical implications and future research avenues are discussed.

Do children understand desires before they understand beliefs? A comparison of 3-year-olds’ grasp of incompatible desires, competitive games and false beliefs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Proft ◽  
Cornelia Hoss ◽  
Katharina Manfredini Paredes ◽  
hannes rakoczy
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Active Choice ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Competitive Games ◽  
Cognitive Attitudes

A long-standing dispute in theory of mind research concerns the development of understanding different kinds of propositional attitudes. The asymmetry view suggests that children understand conative attitudes (e.g., desires) before they understand cognitive attitudes (e.g., beliefs). The symmetry view suggests that notions of cognitive and conative attitudes develop simultaneously. Relevant studies to date have produced inconsistent results, yet with different methods and dependent measures. To test between the two accounts more systematically, we thus combined different forms of desire tasks (incompatible desires and competition) with different forms of measurement (verbal ascription and active choice) in a single design. Additionally, children’s performance in the desire tasks was compared to their false-belief understanding. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were better at ascribing desires than at ascribing beliefs for both desire tasks whereas they had difficulties actively choosing the more desired option in the competition task. The present findings thus favor the asymmetry theory.

The Virtue of Epistemic Trustworthiness and Re-Posting on Social Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 245-264
Author(s):  
Sarah Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Fake News ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Additional Risk ◽  
The Real ◽  
Epistemic Virtues ◽  
Psychological Evidence ◽  
Other Regarding

Re-posting fake news on social media exposes others to epistemic risks that include not only false belief but also misguided trust in the source of the fake news. The risk of misguided trust comes from the fact that re-posting is a kind of credentialing; as a new kind of speech-act, re-posting does not yet have established norms and so runs an additional risk of “bent credentialing.” This chapter proposes that other-regarding epistemic virtues can help us mitigate the epistemic risks that come with re-posting—specifically the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness. It further considers how an epistemically trustworthy person should regulate her re-posting behavior in light of the psychological evidence that retracting false beliefs is far more difficult than might be supposed. Behaving in an epistemically trustworthy way requires being responsive to the real risks that our actions expose others to, as well as recognizing the real ways that others depend on us.

scholarly journals Anti-Exceptionalism About Requirements of Epistemic Rationality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Field
Keyword(s):  
Fixed Points ◽  
Special Property ◽  
Phenomenological Research ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
False Beliefs

Abstract I argue for the unexceptionality of evidence about what rationality requires. Specifically, I argue that, as for other topics, one’s total evidence can sometimes support false beliefs about this. Despite being prima facie innocuous, a number of philosophers have recently denied this. Some have argued that the facts about what rationality requires are highly dependent on the agent’s situation and change depending on what that situation is like (Bradley, Philosophers’ Imprint, 19(3). 2019). Others have argued that a particular subset of normative truths, those concerning what epistemic rationality requires, have the special property of being ‘fixed points’—it is impossible to have total evidence that supports false belief about them (Smithies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85(2). 2012; Titelbaum 2015). Each of these kinds of exceptionality permits a solution to downstream theoretical problems that arise from the possibility of evidence supporting false belief about requirements of rationality. However, as I argue here, they incur heavy explanatory burdens that we should avoid.

Chinese children's understanding of false beliefs: the role of language

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
KANG LEE ◽  
DAVID R. OLSON ◽  
NANCY TORRANCE
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Early Development ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Developmental Pattern ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Old Chinese ◽  
False Belief Tasks ◽  
Probe Question

The present study investigated the universality of the early development of young children's understanding and representation of false beliefs, and specifically, the effect of language on Chinese-speaking children's performance in false belief tasks under three between-subjects conditions. The three conditions differed only in the belief verb that was used in probe questions regarding one's own or another person's beliefs, namely the Chinese verbs, xiang, yiwei, and dang. While the three words are all appropriate to false beliefs, they have different connotations regarding the likelihood of a belief being false, with xiang being more neutral than either yiwei or dang. Experiment i involved thirty-five Chinese-speaking adults who responded to false belief tasks to be used in Experiment 2 in order both to establish an adult comparison and to obtain empirical evidence regarding how Chinese-speaking adults use the three belief verbs to describe different false belief situations. In Experiment 2, 188 three-, four-, and five-year-old Chinese-speaking children participated in three false belief tasks. They were asked to report about an individual's false belief when either xiang, yiwei, or dang was used in the probe question. Results revealed a rapid developmental pattern in Chinese-speaking children's understanding of false belief, which is similar to that found with Western children. In addition, children performed significantly better when yiwei and dang, which connote that the belief referred to may be false, were used in belief questions than when xiang, the more neutral verb, was used. This finding suggests an important role of language in assessing children's understanding of belief and false belief.

The Belief-Desire Model of Action Explanation Reconsidered: Thoughts on Bittner

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Turner
Keyword(s):  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Action Explanation ◽  
Radical Critique

The belief-desire model of action explanation is deeply ingrained in multiple disciplines. There is reason to think that it is a cultural artifact. But is there an alternative? In this discussion, I will consider the radical critique of this action explanation model by Rüdiger Bittner, which argues that the model appeals to dubious mental entities, and argues for a model of reasons as responses to states or events. Instead, for Bittner, agents are reason-selectors—selecting the states or events to respond to and selecting the ones the agent is disposed to respond to. By getting rid of the explanatory role of beliefs, this model runs into difficulties over errors usually attributed to false beliefs. These can be resolved by expanding the notion of dispositions to cover the case of false belief. But this suggests that the belief-reason model serves to divide the category of dispositions in an arbitrary or culturally specific way.

scholarly journals Dogs' looking times and pupil dilation response reveal expectations about contact causality

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph J. Völter ◽  
Ludwig Huber
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Canis Familiaris ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Contact Condition ◽  
Early Age ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Causal Perception ◽  
Violation Of Expectation ◽  
Kinematic Properties

Contact causality is one of the fundamental principles allowing us to make sense of our physical environment. From an early age, humans perceive spatio-temporally contiguous launching events as causal. Surprisingly little is known about causal perception in non-human animals, particularly outside the primate order. Violation-of-expectation paradigms in combination with eye-tracking and pupillometry have been used to study physical expectations in human infants. In the current study, we establish this approach for dogs ( Canis familiaris ). We presented dogs with realistic three-dimensional animations of launching events with contact (regular launching event) or without contact between the involved objects. In both conditions, the objects moved with the same timing and kinematic properties. The dogs tracked the object movements closely throughout the study but their pupils were larger in the no-contact condition and they looked longer at the object initiating the launch after the no-contact event compared to the contact event. We conclude that dogs have implicit expectations about contact causality.

Friends, Secrets, and Lies

Reading Minds ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Henry M. Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Well Being ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Children's Achievement

This chapter examines children’s theory of mind and how it can affect children’s, and adults’, lives. A key window on all of this is children’s understanding, achieved in the preschool years, that people can be ignorant and mistaken. Voluminous “false-belief” studies in countries worldwide illuminate this. Moreover, children’s achievement of these theory-of-mind milestones impacts their friendships or friendlessness. And being friendless can have disastrous consequences for a child’s social and academic life that can continue into adulthood. As well as acquiring friends and avoiding friendlessness, theory-of-mind advances impact a child’s ability to keep secrets, to inform and deceive others, and to persuade and argue—all skills vital to a person’s social well-being. Ultimately, young children who best understand false beliefs are not only better liars, secret keepers, and persuaders but also better accepted by their peers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document