Samuel Steven, Legg Edward W, Lurz Robert, Clayton Nicola S
1 Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
2 Brooklyn College, The City University New York, New York, NY, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Nov;71(11):2395-2410. doi: 10.1177/1747021817742367. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
In the Sandbox Task, participants indicate where a protagonist who has a false belief about the location of an object will look for that object in a trough filled with a substrate that conceals the hidden object's location. Previous findings that participants tend to indicate a location closer to where they themselves know the object to be located have been interpreted as evidence of egocentric bias when attributing mental states to others. We tested the assumption that such biases occur as a result of reasoning about mental states specifically. We found that participants showed more egocentric bias when reasoning from a protagonist's false belief than from their own memory, but found equivalent levels of bias when they were asked to indicate where a false film would depict the object as when they were asked about a protagonist's false belief. Our findings suggest that that egocentric biases found in adult false belief tasks are more likely due to a general difficulty with reasoning about false representations than a specialised difficulty with reasoning about false mental states.
在沙盒任务中，参与者要指出一个对物体位置持有错误信念的主角会在装满掩盖隐藏物体位置的基质的槽中何处寻找该物体。先前的研究结果表明，参与者倾向于指出一个更接近他们自己所知物体位置的地方，这被解释为在将心理状态归因于他人时存在自我中心偏差的证据。我们测试了这样一种假设，即这种偏差是由于专门对心理状态进行推理而产生的。我们发现，与从自己的记忆进行推理相比，参与者在从主角的错误信念进行推理时表现出更多的自我中心偏差，但当被要求指出虚假影片会将物体描绘在哪里时，他们表现出的偏差水平与被问及主角的错误信念时相当。我们的研究结果表明，在成人错误信念任务中发现的自我中心偏差更可能是由于对错误表征进行推理时普遍存在的困难，而不是对错误心理状态进行推理时的特殊困难。
