On this boring Wednesday afternoon, nothing would entertain a
young child more than to play a joke on the babysitter. The
sitter always keeps her lunch in her purse; so when she leaves
the room, the little prankster quickly hides it under the couch.
When the babysitter returns, where will she look first? Whether
from Canada or Thailand, 3-year-old children will most likely
guess under the couch; it will not be until the ripe old age of
5 that they know that the babysitter will look for her lunch
right where she left it. A major social-cognitive achievement of
young children is the understanding that other people act on the
basis of their own representations of reality rather than on the
basis of reality itself. Developmental psychologists have
explored the refinement of mental-state reasoning in children,
typically by measuring their ability to pass false-belief tasks,
such as the example above. Yet previous research has only been
conducted in Western cultures, where children pass such tests
around the age of