The influence of group membership on false-belief attribution in preschool children

The ability to infer beliefs and thoughts in interaction partners is essential in social life. However, reasoning about other people's beliefs might depend on their characteristics or our relationship with them. Recent studies indicated that children's false-belief attribution was influenced by a protagonist's age and competence. In the current experiments, we investigated whether group membership influences the way children reason about another person's beliefs. We hypothesized that 4-year-olds would be less likely to attribute false beliefs to an ingroup member than to an outgroup member. Group membership was manipulated by accent (Experiments 1-3) and gender (Experiment 4). The results indicated that group membership did not consistently influence children's false-belief attribution. Future research should clarify whether the influence of group membership on false-belief attribution either is absent or depends on other cues that we did not systematically manipulate in our study.