Running head: CHILDREN'S ATTRIBUTIONS OF BELIEFS

Children's Attributions 14

and humans is not significant for 6-year-olds, while it is both for 5- and 7-year-olds.
Furthermore, Maya children do not seem to reach the near-ceiling levels that are reported for
many Euro-American samples of the same age on the ‘doll’ false belief question: a t-test against
chance for 6- year-olds did not reach significance [t (11) =.75, p = .082]; even 7-year-olds, while
significantly above chance [t (12) =.77, p = .047], are below the performance level of the
American sample.

6. Discussion

The vast majority of developmental studies of false-belief understanding in reference to
humans focus on samples of Euro-American and East Asian children, often from relatively high
SES backgrounds (see Wellman et al., 2001). The cross-cultural evidence available from
traditional societies so far is incomplete and inconclusive. At any rate, the two available studies
of traditional populations (Avis and Harris, 1991; Vinden, 1996) and the present one seem to
show that there is some uniformity in the way false belief understanding develops, at least where
human agency is concerned. However, even a brief inspection of the data presented above
reveals that Yukatek children seem to be able to reliably pass a false-belief task only at age 7
(although their performance level is extremely close, though not significantly above chance, a
year before); besides, they fail to reach near-ceiling levels at the same age as the children in the
American sample. One possible explanation is that children in this community are less familiar
than American children with the question/response format that characterizes this experimental
task. This suggestion is corroborated by the fact that we were not able to successfully test an
adequate number of 3-year-olds due to their shyness, which does not usually pose problems to

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