Young Children Spontaneously Appreciate the Perspectives of their Social Partners

Human cooperation depends on our ability to reason about other people’s minds. When we face our social partners, what is upright to one person might be upside down to the other, and what is on one’s left would be the other’s right. In five experiments (N = 318), we investigated whether 3- to 4-year-old children appreciate others’ distinct visual experiences when engaged in social actions. Specifically, we presented children with pictures and books that were initially upright to them, and we asked children to show those pictures and books to people who faced the children (i.e., whose perspectives on the pictures and books were opposite those of the children). Across experiments, we found that young children spontaneously oriented pictures and books so that those objects appeared upright to their social partners. Whereas classic research suggests that young children are egocentric, these findings suggest that young children are sensitive to the visual experiences of their social partners. These findings support the possibility that, from early in development, children engage in mental state reasoning to better cooperate with and communicate to their social partners.