Culture and the Sequence of Steps in Theory of Mind Development Ameneh Shahaeian, Candida C. Peterson, and Virginia Slaughter University of Queensland Henry M. Wellman University of Michigan To examine cultural contrasts in the ordered sequence of conceptual developments leading to theory of mind (ToM), we compared 135 3- to 6-year-olds (77 Australians; 58 Iranians) on an established 5-step ToM scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004). There was a cross-cultural difference in the sequencing of ToM steps but not in overall rates of ToM mastery. In line with our predictions, the children from Iran conformed to a distinctive sequence previously observed only in children in China. In contrast to the case with children from Australia (and the United States), knowledge access was understood earlier than opinion diversity in children from Iran, consistent with this collectivist culture’s emphasis on filial respect, dispute avoidance, and acquiring knowledge. Having a sibling was linked with faster overall ToM progress in Australia only and was not related to scale sequences in either culture. Keywords: theory of mind, culture, parenting, siblings, preschoolers With the acquisition of a theory of mind (ToM), children come to understand people’s behavior as the product of their internal, subjective mental states including desire, emotion, and belief. For the last 25 years, most of the research on this crucial development has relied on a single marker of ToM: the inferential false belief test (Dennett, 1978). Children pass this test by accurately predict- ing the actions or thoughts of protagonists with reality-discrepant beliefs that the child does not share. Most typically developing children in all cultures so far examined fail at age 3 years (Well- man, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Yet by age 5 or 6, success on the task is so widespread as to suggest that “understanding of belief and, relatedly, understanding of mind exhibit genuine conceptual change during the preschool period” (Wellman et al., 2001, p. 655). Debate currently surrounds whether this is via the preor- dained maturational unfolding of a neurobiological mind-reading module (see e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992) or whether the uniquely human social and conversational experiences that all societies provide for their young nurture children’s developing understand- ing (see e.g., Astington, 2001). Cross-cultural comparisons can help address these contrasting accounts. However, cross-cultural research to date has yielded contradictory evidence. Thus, some studies have suggested uni- form ages of false belief acquisition in diverse cultural settings such as between urban middle-class Europe or North America and (a) a remote bush community in western Africa (Avis & Harris, 1991), (b) an impoverished Peruvian mountain village (Callaghan et al., 2005), or (c) a Polynesian settlement in Samoa (Callaghan et al., 2005). Yet other studies have shown variations of up to 2 years in the average age for passing false belief tests even between highly similar industrialized societies such as Canada versus the United Kingdom (Wellman et al., 2001), Japan versus Korea (Oh & Lewis, 2008), or mainland versus Hong Kong China (Liu, Wellman, Tardif, & Sabbagh, 2008). This inconsistency may partly reflect “the danger in letting a single task become a marker for complex development” (Asting- ton, 2001, p. 687). ToM conceptually encompasses a range of mental states including emotion, intention, and desire, as well as belief, and recent evidence has suggested that false belief mastery is just one step in a coherent developmental progression of folk psychological insights stretching back though toddlerhood and forward into the school years (see e.g., Pons, Harris & de Rosnay, 2004; Wellman & Liu, 2004). Both to further clarify the timing of ToM mastery and to shed new light on sociocultural influences on the acquisition of psychological understanding, ToM must be examined through a wider lens than just false belief. Pioneering this approach, Wellman, Fang, Liu, Zhu, and Liu (2006) used a five-step developmental scale of ToM understanding to compare Chinese-speaking preschoolers in Beijing with English-speaking preschoolers in the United States. The ToM scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) had previously been well validated and shown, via both Guttman and Rasch analyses, to identify a reliable developmental sequence of mental state concepts in which prog- ress to any later scale step was contingent on mastery of all earlier ones. Preschoolers in the United States mastered the steps in the following order: diverse desires (DD), then diverse beliefs (DB), then knowledge access (KA), then false beliefs (FB), and finally hidden emotions (HE). The same sequence has been shown to replicate exactly for English-speaking preschoolers in Australia (Peterson & Wellman, 2009; Peterson, Wellman, & Liu, 2005) and for preschoolers in Germany (Kristen, Thoermer, Hofer, As- chersleben, & Sodian, 2006). This article was published Online First May 30, 2011. Ameneh Shahaeian, Candida C. Peterson, and Virginia Slaughter, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; Henry M. Wellman, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. This study received indirect support from a grant by the Australian Research Council to Candida C. Peterson, Virginia Slaughter, and Henry M. Wellman. We are very grateful to all the children who took part and to their teachers and parents. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Candida C. Peterson, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia 4072. E-mail: candi@psy.uq.edu.au Developmental Psychology © 2011 American Psychological Association 2011, Vol. 47, No. 5, 1239 –1247 0012-1649/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0023899 1239