The relation between desire and false belief in children's theory of mind: no satisfaction?

Belief and desire are commonly assumed to be the core mental states needed to understand others' behavior. Few studies, however, have investigated both. The current studies assessed whether young children's difficulty with false belief can be explained by desire's dominance over belief, as J. A. Fodor's (1992) nativist theory and the theory theory (K. Bartsch & H. M. Wellman, 1995) claim, and examined the processes underlying children's understanding of desire. Desire inferences of 3- to 5-year-olds were compared with false-belief responses in 4 experiments. For the 3-year-olds, no correspondence was found between desire and belief, suggesting that desire cannot explain young children's difficulty with false belief and that desire relies on different cues than does belief. The findings indicate that studying children's understanding of desire is important for forming an accurate description of theory of mind and for evaluating the different theories of its development.