What’s in the box? – Smarties-test

The ability to think about people's feelings, thoughts, desires, and psychological states is essential for effective communication and interaction with others. Uniquely developed in humans, signs of mentalisation may be observed in young children from a very early age. In the present study, we wanted to find out whether this ability is influenced by the cultural-group membership of the person whose thoughts we are trying to infer. We know, that shared cultural membership can in some cases hinder our ability to read minds, as perceptions of similarity may lead us to extend our own thoughts to the other person (e.g., when I give my debit card to a cashier, I automatically assume that the cashier, who is otherwise unknown to me, has the same knowledge about bank cards as I do). Therefore, this strategy can lead to errors in cases where the other person’s knowledge, feelings etc., differ from our own.

In the present study, we employed a so-called “misconception test”, in which children are first shown a box with a picture of a die glued onto it. Then we show them that the box in fact contains pencils. We then ask the children what a person they have seen in a video before might think about the contents of the box. Our main variable was whether the person in the video at the beginning of the study was introduced to the child in Hungarian or German. The study involved 80 4-year-old children, half of whom saw the Hungarian version and half of whom saw the German version. We wanted to see which group was more successful in attributing misconceptions to the person (i.e., correctly answering that the person in the video presumably thinks there is a die in the box). Our results suggest that slightly more people (16 vs. 12) answered correctly in the German-language condition, but this difference is not statistically significant. Therefore, we cannot claim that cultural group membership has a clear effect on misattribution.