When Knowledge Is a Curse

Abstract

The ability to reason about mental states is critical for predicting and interpreting people's behavior and for communicating effectively. Yet both children and adults exhibit some remarkable limitations in reasoning about mental states. In this article, I outline some of the parallels between children's and adults' fallacies in reasoning about the mind and suggest that a fundamental bias in social cognition contributes to these limitations. This bias is the curse of knowledge—being biased by one's own knowledge when trying to appreciate a more naive perspective. I offer the curse of knowledge as a possible alternative to the popular claim that a qualitative conceptual change occurs in the development of mental-state reasoning and discuss the implications of this bias for social cognition.