Understanding children’s and adults’ limitations in mental state reasoning

Young children exhibit several deficits in reasoning about their own and other people’s mental states. We propose that these deficits, along with more subtle limi-tations in adults ’ social-cognitive reasoning, are all manifestations of the same cognitive bias. This is the ‘curse of knowledge ’ – a tendency to be biased by one’s own knowledge when attempting to appreciate a more naı̈ve or uninformed perspective. We suggest the deve-lopmental differences in mental state reasoning exist because the strength of this bias diminishes with age, not because of a conceptual change in how young chil-dren understand mental states. By pointing out the common denominator in children’s and adults ’ limi-tations in mental state reasoning we hope to provide a unified framework for understanding the nature an