Povinelli et al. interpreted children's task failure as evidence of superior theory of mind, ignoring the equally valid interpretation that chimpanzees outperformed children.
Further exemplifying value-ladenness, it is not uncommon for experimental results in comparative psychology to be communicated in a way that depicts the human species as “superior,” which can be illustrated by some experiments that have compared chimpanzee performance to our own. Daniel Povinelli and colleagues (1999), for example, found that chimpanzees outperform children in a gaze-following task, but interpreted the children’s poorer performance as evidence of their possession of superior cog