Language and “Theory of Mind”: Are Bilingual Children Actually More Empathetic?

Anyone who has spent time with bilingual kids will recognize the moment when the tiny machinery of their thinking emerges. In a Karachi kitchen, a four-year-old asks for water after tilting her head, thinking about her grandmother for a brief moment, and switching from English to Urdu. She was not taught that. She scanned the space. She made a choice regarding the thoughts of another person. She then took action on it almost carelessly.

For years, scholars have been debating whether or not this type of moment has the significance that it appears to have. The question is whether children who grow up switching between two languages also become more adept at switching between viewpoints; that is, whether the day-to-day mechanics of bilingual life subtly develop what is commonly referred to as theory of mind, which is the awareness that others have their own ideas, opinions, and knowledge gaps.

If not conclusive, the evidence is suggestive. Bilingual preschoolers typically do better on false-belief tasks, which are tiny experimental setups used to determine whether a child understands that someone else may hold a mistaken view of the world, according to studies dating back almost 20 years. Admittedly, it’s a limited measure. However, it continues to appear. On average, bilingual kids appear to understand earlier that their knowledge is not always shared by others.

The explanation might be easier than it seems. A bilingual child is always keeping track of which language each person speaks. The teacher speaks English, the grandfather speaks Punjabi, and the visiting cousin from Toronto speaks a mix depending on the situation. That tracking is basically perspective-taking in disguise; it is light, almost invisible, and done dozens of times a day. The child is keeping an eye on what the other person can comprehend and making adjustments. When you slow it down, empathy is not too far from that.

However, there is disagreement in the research, as anyone who closely examines the literature will see. Strong effects are found in some studies, but only in certain tasks, when income and education are taken into consideration, or when the child uses the two languages with genuinely different people. There’s a feeling that the effect is genuine but conditional, that living bilingualism rather than just studying it makes the perspective-taking advantage most evident. A child who attends a language enrichment class twice a week is not the same as a child who is raised in two different cultures.

As you watch this play out, it’s difficult to ignore how quickly the discussion turns into something more. Children’s bilingualism affects nearly every contentious issue in contemporary parenting, including identity, education, migration, screen time, and the importance of grandparents. A second language is fiercely guarded by some families. Some let it wander. Nobody is really told what to do with that by cognitive science. It merely subtly implies that something intriguing might be going on beneath the surface, and that the kids juggling two worlds might be subtly developing the ability to imagine other people’s minds with a fluency that the rest of us have to strive for.

It’s still unclear if that translates into true empathy, which is the deep, emotional kind rather than just the ability to follow another person’s perspective. A child who reads the room well is not necessarily a kinder one, and cognitive perspective-taking and emotional warmth are not the same thing. However, if the preliminary results are correct, there is a real overlap and significant ramifications. The kids who are already doing it might be learning something that the rest of us never fully grasped in a world where more and more people are asked to switch between cultures, languages, and ways of belonging.