British Journal of Developmental Psychology (2014), 32, 388–390

© 2014 The British Psychological Society

www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

Commentary

What domind readers know and what do we knowabout mind readers?

Jacqueline D. Woolley*The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA

In this commentary, I raise various questions about Kim and Harris’s fascinating findings.

I ask what kind of knowledge children expect telepathic individuals to have, who children

might consider to be good mind readers, why children value telepathy, and how puzzled

children are by telepathy. I suggest potential ways to address some of these questions and

end by reiterating the importance of probing individual differences in scepticism and

credulity.

If two people gave you conflicting information about the world, how would you decide

which person to believe? Perhaps, it would depend onwhat the topic of conversationwas– youmight consider one person to bemore of an expert on a particular topic. Or perhaps

it would depend on your previous interactions with these people – maybe one of them

was your best friend, whereas the other was your know-it-all brother in law. Previous

research has shown that, by a very young age, children consider factors like familiarity,

reliability, and expertise in deciding whom to trust. Kim and Harris (2014b) take this line

of research to a new level in considering whether children also value people with

extraordinary powers or supernatural abilities as trustworthy informants. They find that

children who succeed in differentiating people with telepathic ability from those wholack such extraordinary means of knowing others’ minds also prefer to learn new

information from telepathic individuals.

Kim and Harris situate this finding in the long-standing tendency of adults to appeal to

informants who they believe to possess special powers – Shamans, witchdoctors, fortune

tellers, and gods – stating that these special individuals are sought for their ability ‘to

anticipate or alter the course of events and to bring about desired outcomes. . .’ (p. 4). In away, it’s kind of odd to think that someone would seek someone with special powers for

something as mundane as learning a label. Although one might seek information aboutone’s future from a fortune-teller, one would presumably not employ a fortune-teller

to learn a new language. Although one might attempt to communicate with God to

understand the meaning of a traumatic personal event, one would not seek out God to

brush up on calculus. For themajority of our quests for world knowledge, most of us have

other kinds of experts to whom we might turn – teachers, parents, scientists, and the

Internet. An interesting question is whether children also think this way outside of the

context of this experiment. Because Santa Claus knowswhether we’ve been bad or good,

*Correspondence should be addressed to Jacqueline D. Woolley, The University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton, StopA8000, Austin, TX 78712, USA (email: woolley@psy.utexas.edu).

DOI:10.1111/bjdp.12058

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does he also know the words to the National Anthem? Would he know something about

object labels?WouldGod be a good source of scientific facts? If children really do, as these

results suggest, value telepathic people as sources of information about the world then

presumably God and Santa Claus would also be considered good informants. It’s alsointeresting to think about what would happen if these researchers pitted a telepathic

person against a teacher or a scientist in this experimental paradigm. From whom would

children prefer to learn?

This brings up the question of why children preferred to learn from the telepathic

individual. As the authors acknowledge, as the two differentiator groups did not differ, it’s

not because she’s magic. Is she seen as omniscient? Is it that if she knows one thing, she’s

more likely to know another? This doesn’t seem right, as both informants actually know

the answer. Kim and Harris suggest that children come to trust someone’s competenceand then extend that trust to other domains. But what is the nature of that competence?

The difference between the two informants lies in how they learned the information,with

one appearing to learn with significantly less effort. So is it that one is simply a more

efficient learner? Perhaps, this could be tested by having one telepathic person answer

quickly and the other answer withmore contemplation. Alternatively, one could contrast

two ‘normal’ people, with one participating in a lengthy discussion before revealing the

contents of the other person’s thoughts and the other requiring simply a quick exchange.

It seems important to get a clearer sense of why children preferred to learn from thetelepathic individual.

An important question the research raises is why there are age differences in seeming

to understand that a person could read another person’s thoughts. It’s a bit odd to ask this

question, as of course we can’t actually read someone’s thoughts. But given that the

concept of telepathy is present among adults in our culture, it’s no different than asking

about how children learn about other things adults believe in, from superstitions to

politics to religion. The authors raise two possibilities regarding their developmental

findings: (1) younger children don’t (yet) have a concept of telepathy, and (2) youngchildren think it’s generally possible to know other people’s thoughts and so, when faced

with such a feat, don’t feel compelled to appeal to extraordinary powers. My gut feeling is

that it’s the former, but the authors side with the latter, suggesting also that the older

children found the events more puzzling. Yet, we lack explicit evidence that the older

children did indeed find the events more puzzling. I wonder if it would be possible to

assess puzzlement. This brings up the larger questionofwhat people tend to dowhen they

encounter unusual or seemingly impossible events. One thing people do is appeal to

supernatural explanations, like magic, karma, and miracles. Another thing people doperhaps equally as often, or even more often, is simply deny that the event actually

occurred. It may be that the younger children do find the event puzzling but instead of

appealing to telepathy (since they’ve never heard of it), they essentially deny that

extraordinary communicationhas occurred and instead assert that thepersonwas told the

answer. It would be interesting to look more systematically at when children are more

likely to appeal to extraordinary forces and when they are more likely to simply deny the

existence of unusual events.

The results of the present study conflict with Kim and Harris’s earlier finding thatchildrenwhobelieved inmagicweremorewilling to learn from amagical-seeming person

(Kim & Harris, 2014a). It may simply be that many children, although they find telepathy

to be extraordinary, do not consider it ‘magic.’ Probably, most adults who believe in

telepathy would be reluctant to label it magic as well. Perhaps, a way to assess whether

Kim and Harris’s earlier findings apply in the psychological domain would be to look at

Mind-reading puzzles 389

wishing. Previous research frommy laboratory has shown that children consider wishing

to be a magical process (Woolley, Phelps, Davis, & Mandell, 1999). Researchers could

present children with one informant who wishes to obtain something (e.g., wishes for a

cookie, which instantly appears) and one who obtains an object in a more mundane way,like asking his friend for one. Would children who believe more strongly in wishing be

morewilling to learn from someonewhosewishes appeared to come true? If so, onemight

want to solicit explanations to get a sense of why children would respond this way. Is it

because they view the person as powerful or special, or because they see the person as

similar to themselves in that they also believe in wishing, or for some other reason?

I’ll end with one last puzzle: In both the present paper and in Kim and Harris (2014a),

there were sizable individual differences in level of belief in extraordinary abilities; in the

present paper, these were most evident among the older children and in Kim and Harrisamong the younger ones. These individual differences clearly have the potential to affect

children’s learning in a range of domains. Where do these individual differences come

from?What make one child more likely to believe inmagic, to endorse telepathy, to make

wishes, to have an imaginary friend? And is the child who believes inmagic the same child

who later believes in karma, orwho later believes inmiracles? Essentially, whatmakes one

child credulous and another sceptical? I’m sceptical that the answer will be a simple one,

but I’m certain that with continued research like this we’ll eventually figure it out.

References

Kim, S., & Harris, P. L. (2014a). Belief in magic predicts children’s selective trust in informants.

Journal of Cognition and Development, 15, 181–196.Kim, S., & Harris, P. L. (2014b). Children prefer to learn from mind-readers. British Journal of

Developmental Psychology, 32, 375–387. doi:10.1111/bjdp.12044Woolley, J. D., Phelps,K. E., Davis,D. L.,&Mandell, D. J. (1999).Where theories ofmindmeetmagic:

The development of children’s beliefs about wishing. Child Development, 70, 571–587. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00042

Received 21 July 2014

390 Jacqueline D. Woolley