Children's Attributions 7
will look for the object. Children, therefore, are asked to infer whether Sally will act according to
her false belief (that the object is still in the original container) or not.
Another false belief task, the one used in the experiments that will be presented later, is
known as the ‘surprising contents’ task. In it, children are shown a closed container (usually a
cracker box with a conspicuous picture of its contents on the outside) and asked what they
believe is in it. The experimenter then opens the box to reveal that the crackers have been
removed, and that small rocks (or a similarly unexpected item) have been put in their place. After
reclosing the box, the experimenter checks that the children are still clear on what the box
contains. The experimenter then introduces a doll who has not seen the inside of the box, and
asks what the doll would think is in the container. Again, the point of the experiment is to
establish whether children are capable of figuring out that other agents may have false beliefs
and act accordingly.
3. The development of god concepts
By and large the research pertaining to children’s understanding of agent concepts deals
exclusively with human agent concepts: how children’s concepts of human agency become
increasingly specialized. In false-belief tasks, as well as in most other studies of children’s
understanding of agency, experimenters have asked children to reason about human actions,
beliefs, desires, and emotions. Very little available research addresses the generalizability of
children’s understanding of agency to non-human agents in general, and to God in particular.
However, by looking at the assumptions of several theoretical positions, we can envisage their
predictions concerning the understanding of God in comparison to humans in a false-belief task.