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It is helpful to understand what the people we interact with know. For example, if I understand that my friend already knows my address, I can simply ask her to come to “my house” rather than having to list my full address each time I invite her over. However, sometimes we predict that the people close to us share more knowledge with us than they actually do – a phenomenon called the closeness-communication bias. Here, I might mistakenly assume that my friend still knows my address, even though I just recently moved to a new apartment! In a study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, we investigated whether 4- to 6-year-old children are already affected by the closeness-communication bias. We asked children to come into the lab and play a perspective taking game, either with their parent or with a research assistant they had not met before. In the game, the parent or the research assistant sat on the opposite side of a shelf, and asked children to collect various items out of the shelf. The trick was that children had to consider which of the items their partner could see, because only some of the sections in the shelf were visible to the parent or research assistant. We found that children made more errors (i.e., selected more items that their partner could not see) when playing with their caregiver, suggesting that even young children might experience the closeness-communication bias! 

Anderson, L., Liberman, Z., & Martin, A. (2023). Shared social groups or shared experiences? The effect of shared knowledge on children’s perspective-taking. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 234, 105707.