Children's Attributions 2
Abstract
The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of
human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all
agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run
with a sample of Maya children aged 4 to 7, and place them in the context of several
psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in
different ways to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the
universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning.