Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception

1983/01/01 by H Wimmer, Heinz Wimmer · 6,341 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Deception #Epistemology #Linguistics #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Object (grammar) #Philosophy #Psychology #Representation (politics) #Social psychology #Statement (logic) #Surprise

paper · doi:10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5

published in Cognition 13(1), 103-128 (Elsevier BV)

openalex publication_date 1983/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03

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• The relations between children’s communicative perspective-taking and executive functioning
• Non-literal language processing is jointly supported by the language and theory of mind networks: Evidence from a novel meta-analytic fMRI approach
• Children disassociate from antisocial in-group members
• Understanding possibility through action: Young children’s modal reasoning in agentive contexts
• “John thinks that Mary thinks that…” attribution of second-order beliefs by 5- to 10-year-old children
• Reflexively mindblind: Using theory of mind to interpret behavior requires effortful attention
• Toward a hierarchical model of social cognition: A neuroimaging meta-analysis and integrative review of empathy and theory of mind.
• Measuring Variation in Gaze Following Across Communities, Ages, and Individuals: A Showcase of TANGO-CC (Task for Assessing iNdividual differences in Gaze understanding-Open-Cross-Cultural)
• An Active-Inference Approach to Second-Person Neuroscience
• Understanding Other Minds: Linking Developmental Psychology and Functional Neuroimaging
• On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism.
• The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism
• Topic maintenance in social conversation: What children need to learn and evidence this can be taught
• From monkeys to infants: the empirical challenges facing mental fictionalism
• It Takes Two to Tango: Towards Theory of AI's Mind
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• The Significance of Names
• Hypergame Rationalisability: Solving Agent Misalignment In Strategic Play
• Perspective conflict disrupts pragmatic inference in real-time language comprehension.
• Mind the Motions: Benchmarking Theory-of-Mind in Everyday Body Language
• Why study turn‐taking sequences in interspecies interactions?
• The Brain's Default Network
• Joint Inference of States, Robot Knowledge, and Human (False-)Beliefs
• Dissociating Empathy From Perspective-Taking: Evidence From Intra- and Inter-Individual Differences Research
• Testing theory of mind in large language models and humans
• Do infants attribute false beliefs to a visible agent with no visual access?
• Do young children understand the objectivity of reality?
• Altered Theory of Mind Engagement and Neural Alignment in Social Anxiety During Movie Viewing
• Rethinking the “we” in “we” intentionality: intention-sharing with —and not simply about —things
• Imaginative Thought
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• The ageing of the social mind: replicating the preservation of socio-affective and the decline of socio-cognitive processes in old age
• The link between anxiety and theory of mind in children: A meta-analysis
• Animal empathy reconsidered: a multidimensional profile account
• An advanced test of theory of mind: Understanding of story characters' thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped, and normal children and adults
• The potential of virtual reality in social skills training for people with autistic spectrum disorders
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• Mindfulness for Preschoolers: Effects on Prosocial Behavior, Self-Regulation and Perspective Taking
• Common Sense and Sociological Explanations
• The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication
• Decoding the intent-to-outcome developmental shift in moral judgment, from infancy to preschool age: A critical review and a novel proposition
• A new false belief test for 36‐month‐olds
• Pretend Play as Twin Earth: A Social-Cognitive Analysis
• Doing Things with Words: Rethinking Theory of Mind Simulation in Large Language Models
• Perceptual symbol systems
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• The psychology of folk psychology
• Cognitive Architecture for Mutual Modelling
• Folk Psychology as Simulation
• Theory of Mind and Self‐Consciousness: What Is It Like to Be Autistic?
• Learning words from speakers with false beliefs
• Children's attitude problems: Bootstrapping verb meaning from syntax and pragmatics
• Preserved Spontaneous Mentalizing Amid Reduced Intersubject Variability in Autism During a Movie Narrative
• Spontaneous High-Order Generalization in Neural Theory-of-Mind Networks
• The social mind: disentangling affective and cognitive routes to understanding others
• Ravens attribute visual access to unseen competitors
• Theory of mind deficits in Korsakoff's syndrome and alcohol use disorder: Similar deficits but different underlying cognitive processes
• Working memory predicts changes in children’s theory of mind during middle childhood: A training study
• A Longitudinal Randomized Control Study of Companion Chatbot Use: Anthropomorphism and Its Mediating Role on Social Impacts
• TactfulToM: Do LLMs Have the Theory of Mind Ability to Understand White Lies?
• Children Are Cursed
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• ToM-SSI: Evaluating Theory of Mind in Situated Social Interactions
• Neural processing of social interaction: Coordinate‐based meta‐analytic evidence from human neuroimaging studies
• Social World Models
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• Assessment of Social Cognition and Theory of Mind: Initial Validation of the Geneva Social Cognition Scale
• Beyond Prompt-Induced Lies: Investigating LLM Deception on Benign Prompts
• Do Large Language Models Have a Planning Theory of Mind? Evidence from MindGames: a Multi-Step Persuasion Task
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• False-belief understanding in infants
• Through a looking glass, darkly: Using mechanisms of mind perception to identify accuracy, overconfidence, and underappreciated means for improvement
• Is transition from failing to passing False Belief Task reflected in the social brain? Insights from an fNIRS study with preschoolers
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• Social and cognitive correlates of children's lying behavior. [europepmc]
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• Neural bases of eye and gaze processing: the core of social cognition. [europepmc]
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• False-belief understanding in infants. [europepmc]
• The accidental transgressor: morally-relevant theory of mind. [europepmc]
• Ventromedial prefrontal volume predicts understanding of others and social network size. [europepmc]
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• Putting together phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives on empathy. [europepmc]
• The role of metacognition in human social interactions. [europepmc]
• Developmental changes in the structure of the social brain in late childhood and adolescence. [europepmc]
• Theory of mind: a neural prediction problem. [europepmc]
• Common brain areas engaged in false belief reasoning and visual perspective taking: a meta-analysis of functional brain imaging studies. [europepmc]
• The default network and self-generated thought: component processes, dynamic control, and clinical relevance. [europepmc]
• Understanding the Intentions of Others: Re-Enactment of Intended Acts by 18-Month-Old Children. [europepmc]
• An integrative neural model of social perception, action observation, and theory of mind. [europepmc]
• Development of the social brain from age three to twelve years. [europepmc]
• Consensus Paper: Cerebellum and Social Cognition. [europepmc]