Does social distance modulate adults' egocentric biases when reasoning about false beliefs?

ABSTRACT: When given privileged information of an object's true location, adults often overestimate the likelihood that a protagonist holding a false belief will search in the correct location for that object. This type of egocentric bias is often labelled the 'curse of knowledge'. Interestingly, the magnitude of this bias may be modulated by the social distance between the perspective taker and target. However, this social distance effect has yet to be fully demonstrated when adults reason about false beliefs. Using a continuous false belief task, we investigated i) whether adults were biased by their own knowledge when reasoning about another's false belief, ii) whether the magnitude of this egocentric bias was modulated by social distance, and iii) whether this social distance effect extended to

SUBMITTER: Farrar BG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5993257 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature