Many aspects of human behavior are the result of internal mental states such as beliefs and desires. Furthermore, as is well known, even young children perceive, interpret, predict, and explain the behavior of others in terms of their underlying mental states. The acquisition of such abilities collectively referred to as a “theory of mind” is early, universal, seemingly effortless, and largely dissociable from more general intellectual development. In adults, the exercise of such abilities is often irresistible and seemingly instantaneous.Marketing Research and Data Analysis

One hallmark of a mature theory of mind is the ability to reason about false beliefs: One can often successfully reason about true beliefs simply by considering the world itself as a proxy, but this heuristic fails in the case of false beliefs. As such, successful reasoning about false beliefs is a sufficient criterion for the existence of a theory of mind. It is precisely this ability that is tapped by the “false-belief task,” wherein a child must infer that a protagonist will look for a target object where he mistakenly believes it to be, rather than looking at its actual location.