Kids do not know as much adults, this is quite clear. They don’t have the experience you get from growing up, and not just that they aren’t as developed as adults either. This lack of experience can lead to some embarrassing situations when children don’t understand what they are saying. They show a big misunderstanding of things that we take for granted. One crazy thing they got confused about is that they assume everyone knows everything that they know, such as if something is in a place that it shouldn’t be, and only the child knew this information, they would think everyone else knew it too (up to a certain age at least). The idea behind this is that young children don’t have a concept known as ‘Theory of Mind’, which is knowing that other people have thoughts different to their own.
Where does the evidence for this come from? One way it is tested is through a task in which the child is given information that an experimenter doesn’t have access to. So, for example, the child will be sitting with two people in a room, with a box that they all know is full of something (say pencils), then one of the two people will leave the room. The person still in the room will prompt the child to hide something else in the place the pencils are. At this point, the child is asked what the person who left the room will think is hidden. If the child is older than four, then they will do it easily, they’ll be able to understand that the other person will have been tricked and will correctly assume the other person will still think there are pencils hidden. But if they are younger than three, they assume the other person will know everything they know, and as such will think the other person also knows pencils are no longer hidden.
However, perhaps this is from a different effect instead. Children under four have issues understanding a different but certainly related problem also. If you show a child a box of smarties and ask them to tell you what is inside it, they will answer with smarties, for obvious reasons. They would have no reason to believe otherwise so this makes sense. Then, open the box and show the child that inside the box there are pencils, this confuses them. A child under four when asked will now tell you that they always knew there were pencils in there. This is interesting in that it appears they can’t remember what they used to think is in there, but it could be explained by them wanting to avoid embarrassment. As such the same experiment was conducted, but instead of asking them what they originally thought was hiding they instead ask what a puppet who is also there originally thought was in it. What happens then? The child will still guess that the puppet thought there were always pencils hidden in it. So what really causes this?
Recent research suggests it is due to the child not being able to ‘integrate’ their experiences. This was found by getting the child to write down what they originally thought was in it on a letter, and then ‘post’ it (in a fake post box). The results from this found that the child could now answer correctly, they could now tell the researcher that they did think there were smarties in it at first. This is astonishing because it suggests that children can’t think towards the past, they only think in the present. That is unless they have some concrete proof that they did originally believe something else.
This all gives evidence to believe that children are stuck in the present, and in their own mind. They can’t think about others, because they only know their own thoughts exist, and they are stuck in the present because they can’t understand that they thought something different previously.
Jack
Don’t leave yet! Why not check out some other articles?
How Language Changes How We See Positions
Just Reading Won’t Do – Study tips from Real Psychological Research.
Exbrain that to me! 
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