Is altercentrism WEIRD? A cross-cultural comparison on the susceptibility to other’s beliefs

Social interactions require their participants to represent each other’s beliefs. This is especially challenging when the individuals' beliefs contradict each other. Humans struggle with the task of holding two different, contradictory views about their environment in their minds. Interestingly, not only does inhibiting their own beliefs appear to be difficult, but in some situations, the beliefs of others interfere with their own behavior. It seems that humans automatically represent their partner’s view about the environment, even in situations where this point of view is irrelevant or even adverse. A research team around Kovács (2010) showed that even infants showed this interference towards the other person's belief (so-called altercentric interference/bias). In their study, the infants’ looking time was influenced by the false belief of an observing agent, even in situations where the infant was holding a true belief of the hiding location of a ball. Interestingly, these false beliefs not only modulated the looking time when the agent was present but also later when the agent was not present anymore. So far, most studies examining the altercentric interference were tested in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations, which is a known problem specifically for psychology studies (Nielsen et al., 2017). To claim that altercentric cognition is a human-specific “social sense” (Kovács et al., 2010), we need to study this trait cross-culturally. Therefore, one aim of this project is to study whether non-westernized populations (i.e., BaYaka and Bandongo, Likouala Region, Republic of the Congo) also show the altercentric interference effects.