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Only Familiar Information is a “Curse”: Children’s Ability to Predict What Their Peers Know
Author(s) -
Ghrear Siba,
Fung Klint,
Haddock Taeh,
Birch Susan A.J.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.13437
Subject(s) - curse , psychology , misattribution of memory , perspective (graphical) , fluency , social psychology , knowledge level , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , cognition , mathematics education , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , sociology , anthropology , computer science
The ability to make inferences about what one’s peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments ( n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one’s knowledge when reasoning about others’ knowledge, in children’s estimates of their peers’ knowledge. Four‐ to 7‐year‐olds were taught the answers to factual questions and estimated how many peers would know the answers. When children learned familiar answers, they showed a curse of knowledge in their peer estimates. But, when children learned unfamiliar answers to the same questions, they did not show a curse of knowledge. These data shed light on the mechanisms underlying perspective taking, supporting a fluency misattribution account of the curse of knowledge.