Belief-Desire Reasoning among Baka Children:

Evidence for a Universal Conception of Mind

By: Jeremy Avis & Paul Harris

Mahshid Far
Arizona State University
Article Summary

As the title of this paper indicates, Avis and Harris hypothesized that the concept of

belief-desire reasoning is universally adapted in early childhood. This universally adapted

mentalistic framework is independent from cross cultural differences among children.

According to these researchers the whole idea of the belief-desire reasoning comes

together with the concept of BELIEF which together with the concept DESIRE plays a

key role in interpreting and predicting behavior. In other words young children

understand that people’s actions and feelings cannot be predicted only based on their

current situation, but must be related to their desires and beliefs that they bring with them

to the situation.

According to this research children will adapt the idea that a person’s beliefs has

an impact on action and emotions, or simply learn that people feel happy or sad

depending on whether they expect to get what they want or not. Therefore according to

Fodor, people’s behavior no matter which culture they belong to, is ascribed by their

beliefs and desires to that behavior. However the question that remained to be answered

by this research is to find whether or not children everywhere do adopt the similar

mentalistic framework to predict action and emotion.

In order to test their hypothesis Avis and Harris decided to compare two groups of

children from Baka and North American societies together. Avis and Harris studied

children's concept of mental states in the Baka tribe-a hunter-gatherer tribe living in the

rain forests of Cameroon. For the experiment that took place in Baka finding an

experimenter became a challenge since they tried to use tow Europeans who spoke

2
enough Baka to administer the test questions. However the children were distracted due

to the presence of outsiders. Finally the two experimenters used to administer the

questions were chosen from Baka visitors who were not the permanent members group

because they lived a sedentary life near the only road in the region and yet they were

familiar with a lot of children who were chosen for this experiment. The experimenters

were educated adults who also helped the researchers to correct the wording of the

questions in Baka. Out of 48 children who were tested from the four Baka camps, total of

14 children were discarded from the experiment either because the experimenter pose the

incorrect questions or because they were distracted or upset during the procedure, which

caused them to give incomplete or no answers at all to the questions asked. The

remaining Thirty-four children were equally divided into one of two groups: the younger

group was comprised of children ranging in ages from about 3- to 4-years-old (2 years 11

months to 4 years 3 months); the older group consisted of children ranging in age from

about 4- to 6-years-old (4 years to 4 months to 6 years 1 month). None of the children

attended school or could read or write.

The age of children was determined by the four seasons in southeast Cameroon

which is marked by a distinctive temperature and rainfall as well as associated activities

common to each season such as: planting, harvesting, coffee reckoning, and dam fishing.

As a result of this calculations the estimated of mean ages were likely to be correct to

within 1 or 2 months despite possible mistakes in identifying the exact birth dates for

each child.

The procedure was performed in a cooking area of a native hut in order to make it

familiar to Baka children. Using a false-belief task paradigm, individual children watched

3
as the two experimenters cooked a favorite delicacy. One of the experimenters explained

he had to leave, but would return shortly. The remaining experimenter asked the child to

play a game and hide the favorite food in a new location. After the food was hidden

children were asked three questions about what would happen upon the return of the

absent experimenter. The questions were (1) "When Mopfana comes back, where will he

look for the kernels, in the bowl (original location) or in the pot (new location)? (2)

Before Mopfana lifts the lid of the bowl, will he feel good or bad? (3) After he lifts the

lid, will he feel good or bad? Children were then praised regardless of their responses and

allowed to go. Subjects’ responses were tape-recorded for later analysis with a tie-pin

microphone concealed in a drum or a gathering basket. Later the tapes were review in

two stages, first by the joint help of researchers and the experimenters then by the

researchers alone. Correct responses to the questions were that Mopfana would look in

the original location for the kernels (since he wasn't aware they had been hidden) and that

initially he would feel good when he lifted the lid to look for the food. After lifting the

lid, of course, Mopfana would feel bad.

As a result of this experiment the majority (15 out of 17) of children within both

age groups answered all three questions accurately. Chi square scores demonstrated their

performance was better than would be expected by chance. On the whole, the younger

group failed to perform above chance for any of the three questions; however, six of the

younger children and 12 older children were accurate on all three questions. It is also

important to note that the young children who gave an incorrect answer to all three

questions had considered other alternate and logical explanations for the behavior of the

experimenter. Group means were analyzed using a t-test which revealed a significant

4
difference in performance for the two groups, with older children outperforming their

younger counterparts. Based on two binomial tests, the chance probability of three correct

replies by any individual child was one in eight; however the number of children who

were completely correct exceeded chance for each age group. Since a test of belief-based

reasoning is mainly demonstrated in question 1 and 2 then another binomial test was

performed for this assumption. Using this assumption each individual child was expected

to produce two correct answers with a probability of one in four despite the fact that eight

younger children and 14 older children were correct on both questions. Based on these

results the data indicated that older children could engage in belief-desire reasoning,

however the accuracy of the performance was correlated with the age differences among

the two age groups.

Results of this study indicated that by four to five years of age, Baka children can

accurately predict the actions of others based on individual's beliefs and desires about a

situation, rather than on the objective situation itself. Although some three-year-olds are

competent at the task, there are clear age-related changes in performance. Avis and Harris

tentatively offered their findings as evidence that belief-desire reasoning might be

regarded a universal aspect of human development.

The belief-desired reasoning theory accounts well for the findings of a variety of tasks

across diverse cultures. In short, it has provided a most fruitful means of inquiry for

studying some aspects of children's cognitive development.

In summary with the study of Baka children, Avis and Harris tested a concept at

the heart of the theory of mind, accounts that there are clear and consistent age-related

changes in children's ability to understand the mental states of others, and that these

5
changes represent a change in children's ability to represent the mental states of others as

well. They used a research paradigm that has been launched by theory of mind

conceptualizations of development, one that exploits the distinction between children's

early non-representational theories and their later representational models-the false-belief

task. Finally, their findings are consistent with theory of mind predictions and with the

data from previous research. Although Avis and Harris provide evidence that the

developmental pattern of belief-desire reasoning appears to be universal, their research

lends nothing to the debate over what, if anything, about this cognitive capacity is innate,

and by what mechanisms it develops.

The opposite theory presented in Avis and Harris paper is the idea posed by social

anthropologists, indicating that conception of mind varies cross culturally. There are 3

possible resolutions suggested in this paper for the anthropologists’ alternate theories.

First there is definitely a possibility that the anthropologist view of mind might be true.

Since we are still at early stages of developmental research with focus in such topics.

Therefore not unless farther in depth studies are done we could reject their point of views.

After all hypotheses are uneducated guesses that are considered wrong unless proven

otherwise. Second resolution is that the anthropologist view of development of mind

could help developmental psychologist to learn about other possible modes of thoughts

and development of human cognition. The third resolution however will elaborate upon

the fact that cultural variations in the way that mental states are conceived do exist.

Recent studies suggest that the belief-desired reasoning has an evolutionary implication,

mainly selection that has enabled humans to adopt the trait universally regardless of

6
culture. Farther studies are necessary to provide connections between evolution and the

belief-desire reasoning theory.

Reference

Avis, J. and Harris, P. L.(1991) Belief-Desire Reasoning among Baka Children:

Evidence for a Universal Conception of Mind. Child Development, 62, 460-467

Leslie, A. M., German, T. P., Polizzi P. (2005) Belief-Desire Reasoning as a process of

selection. Cognitive Psychology, 50, 45-85.

Siegler, R., Deloache, J., & Eisenberg, N. (2006). How Children Develop. Second
Edition. New York: Worth publishers.