When knowledge is a curse – children’s and adults’ reasoning about mental states

ABSTRACT—The ability to reason about mental states is critical for predicting and interpreting people’s behavior and for communicating effectively. Yet both children and adults exhibit some remarkable limitations in reasoning about mental states. In this article, I outline some of the parallels between children’s and adults ’ fallacies in rea-soning about the mind and suggest that a fundamental bias in social cognition contributes to these limitations. This bias is the curse of knowledge—being biased by one’s own knowledge when trying to appreciate a more naive per-spective. I offer the curse of knowledge as a possible al-ternative to the popular claim that a qualitative conceptual change occurs in the development ofmental-state reasoning and discuss the implications of this bias for social cognition. KEYWORDS—social cognition; cognitive development; the