Young children's treating of utterances as unreliable sources of knowledge

In two investigations (N = 62 and 59), three- and four-year-old children sometimes disbelieved what they were told about the unexpected contents of a deceptive box, even when they had seen the adult speaker look inside the box before s/he told them what s/he saw, and despite being able to recall the utterance: utterances were treated as unreliable sources of knowledge compared with seeing directly. Those who did believe the utterance were no better at recalling their prior belief about the box's contents (now treated as false), than those who saw inside the box. However using a narrative procedure, we replicated Zaitchik's (1991) result that children are more likely to acknowledge another's belief when they are told about reality, than when they see reality for themselves. We argue that these children were acknowledging alternative rather than false belief.