Culturally constituted universals: Evidential basis of belief matters

Differences in the sequence with which children pass the tasks in Wellman and Liu's (2004) theory of mind (ToM) battery is increasingly bringing into question the universal and cultural specifics of children's developing understanding of others' minds. Children from China, Iran, and Turkey pass the knowledge access (KA) task of the battery earlier than they pass the diverse beliefs (DB) task (e.g., Selcuk et al., 2018). This pattern is the reverse of what has been documented with children from Australia and the US (e.g., Peterson et al., 2005). This paper presents three studies with Turkish samples that explore the possible reasons for developmental sequence and performance differences in the ToM battery. Study 1 investigated Turkish-speaking adults' judgments of appropriateness for different epistemic verbs as used in the DB and false belief (FB) tasks. Study 2 investigated whether adults' performance (i.e., accuracy, reaction time) on FB tasks were affected by culturally preferred uses of these verbs. Collectively these studies showed that adults found different epistemic language ("guess," "think," and the Turkish-specific "falsely think") to be appropriate for different belief-based tasks. However, there was no difference in adults' performance based on epistemic language. In Study 3, Turkish-speaking preschoolers' performance in belief-related tasks based on variations in epistemic language and epistemic features (i.e., presence of evidence) was investigated. Among five modifications, Turkish children benefited only from a modification that involved the manipulation of the epistemological basis for ambiguous beliefs (i.e., visual evidence for belief). RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Turkish adults find different epistemic language ("guess," "think," and the Turkish-specific "falsely-think") to be appropriate for different belief-based tasks (diverse and false belief tasks). Turkish adults' performance on false belief (FB) tasks is not affected by epistemic language. Turkish children perform better in diverse beliefs (DB) task if an epistemological basis for ambiguous beliefs (i.e., visual evidence for either belief) is provided.