Young Children Spontaneously Appreciate the Perspectives of their Social Partners

Classic research has found that young children are often egocentric when reasoning about others’ visual experiences. In two experiments (total N = 148), we investigated 3- to 4-year- old children’s abilities to reason about others’ distinct visual experiences when they are engaged in social actions. Across experiments, we found that young children spontaneously oriented pictures and books so that those objects appeared upright to their social partners. These findings suggest that past research has underestimated young children’s understanding of others’ minds.