I've bookmarked the site--it has piqued my interest and I want to read more!
I'd never heard about the "Sally Ann Test" before. So I watched a YouTube video where a lecturer described how the Sally Ann test works. For fun (underline--for
fun), I thought about it like this...
She mentions, as part of the description, that Ann is not a very good friend, and that (assuming based on the lecturer's sentence construction that conclusion follows premise) is the reason why Ann steals the marble.
What they leave out is whether or not
Sally knows that Ann is not a good friend (I'll be charitable--maybe the lecturer left this out). Without that piece of data, we don't
really know what's going on in Sally's mind. The lecturer also neglected to mention how old Sally and Ann are, though perhaps we can assume that because they wear cartoon children's clothing, and commune in a world of boxes, baskets and marbles, that they are in some sort of nursery school, daycare, kindergarten, or early grade school setting (and not a psychiatric hospital or something like that), so we'd probably have to assume for both children that they've not totally outgrown a fairly narcissistic worldview, or rather, given that we are not even asked to consider Ann's point of view in this situation, we'd simply have to make an assumption about Sally. (That little thief can rot for all we care.)
If Sally is old enough to develop judgments of character about others and is distrustful of Ann, knowing that Ann has issues that lead her to act out in instances of kleptomania, maybe she would reasonably arrive at the conclusion that Ann would steal her marble the minute she had the opportunity, and look in Ann's box first. I remember being in grade school, and it was quite well known who the kid in class was who had the sticky fingers.
However--maybe Sally hasn't heard the peer judgments about Ann. Or maybe she's still in a narcissistic, early-childhood-type phase due to neglect on the part of her parents. Or maybe she has been raised to assume the best of others, despite what her gossiping classmates have said. Or maybe she's so advanced that even though she knows that Ann is "not a good friend" and steals stuff, she doesn't want to give Ann the impression that no one trusts her, because she knows everyone else automatically jumps to the conclusion that Ann would steal their stuff, and maybe she wants Ann to feel that despite the marginalization she experiences from her classmates and her probably her parents and teachers too, that someone else has faith in her, because deep down, Sally knows Ann acts out because she has been labeled "not a good friend" and has internalized this judgment and ultimately has no sense of self-worth. So maybe for of one of these reasons, Sally looks in her own basket.
(If you answer the question like this, I would have to guess that a psychologist, given his or her presumed body of knowledge and career path that brought him or her to such a juncture that he or she would be administering a facile test like this one and believe wholeheartedly in its validity, would assume that you are on the spectrum.
)
