Children over 5 think that partners evaluate them less positively than they evaluative their partners.

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Social Relationships

Abstract

Humans spend much of their time worrying about what others think of them. This contributes to much unhappiness, and not a few clinical diagnoses. Recently, Boothby et al. (2018) reported a striking demonstration of the persistent nature of these worries: After two adults have briefly interacted with one another, both believe that they like their partner more than their partner likes them. This ‘Liking Gap’ illusion is argued to be driven by individuals’ worrying about the impression they make on others. If so, one would expect the Liking Gap to emerge in childhood at around age 5, the age at which reputational concerns emerge, and to intensify between 5 and 11, when their understanding of these concerns and their associated behavioral strategies become more sophisticated (Engelmann & Rapp, 2018; Silver & Shaw, 2018).
To test these hypotheses, we conducted a study with 241 US children (4 to 11 years) in which pairs of children who did not know each other in advance played together with magnet tiles for 5 minutes. Next, they were taken apart and asked how positively they evaluated their partner and how positively they thought their partner had evaluated them. In line with our hypotheses, the data showed a Liking Gap emerging at age 5, and this gap becoming increasingly pronounced in older children.
Interestingly, when looking at the data in more detail, the initial emergence of the Liking Gap between age 4 and 5 and its intensification between age 5 and 11 seemed to be driven by different psychological developments: The emergence of the Liking Gap between age 4 and 5 was driven by 5 year olds evaluating their partner more positively than 4 year olds while perceptions of how their partner evaluated them did not change between 4 and 5. In contrast, the widening of the Liking Gap (i.e., the gap becoming more extreme) between 5 and 11 was driven by children becoming increasingly skeptical about how their partners would evaluate them (while their evaluation of their partner remained the same). These results thus bear important implications for our understanding of the emergence and development of children’s sensitivity to their reputation and the impression they make on others: Although it might be intuitive to construe this sensitivity in terms of children’s increasing concern with how others evaluate them, we must also consider the possibility that the emergence of this sensitivity might initially be driven by an increase in the psychological reward children derive from social interactions with strangers during early childhood.
Overall, the current results demonstrating the development of the Liking Gap through early and middle childhood illustrates the emergence of humans’ concern for the impression they make on others during social interactions. It appears such concerns profoundly shape our social reality even from an early age on, by influencing the way we think others evaluate us, and thus, ultimately, by shaping the way in which we evaluate ourselves.

Author

• Wouter Wolf, Universiteit Utrecht
  Presenting Author