Children's understanding of modesty in front of peer and adult audiences

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that the understanding of modesty—downplaying one's achievements to evoke a positive social evaluation—develops in the primary school years. However, very little is known about how children's understanding of modesty is associated with social contextual factors, such as audience type. A sample of 92 children aged 8–11 years responded to hypothetical vignettes where the protagonist responded either modestly or immodestly to praise. The findings supported earlier indications of an increase with age in the understanding of modesty, and further found that modesty was judged as more appropriate for peer audiences than for adult audiences. No interactions between age group and audience type were observed. Children's increasing approval of modesty was associated with a tendency to justify their judgements by referring to concerns about social evaluation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Children’s understanding of depreciation in scenarios of envy and modesty

“…Lee et al (2001) asked for moral judgments about characters lying about good deeds (white lies). Meanwhile, Banerjee presented statements that minimized the achievements of the characters as self-presentational tactics (Banerjee 2000(Banerjee , 2002Banerjee & Yuill, 1999, Watling & Banerjee, 2007. Both methods revealed that the period between six and ten years of age is when complex interpersonal reasoning developed.…”

“…This reasoning is linked to the complex theory of mind and socio-emotional and moral competencies. All of these are, in turn, related to the appropriate use of emotion display rules and self-presentational tactics linking affective and cognitive social knowledge (Watling & Banerjee, 2007). Self-presentation rules require individuals to know and manage the information displayed about themselves in order to create an acceptable public image.…”

Young children's beliefs about self‐disclosure of performance failure and success

“…For example, they expect people to act more modestly around peers than teachers (Watling & Banerjee, 2007). Moreover, school-age children and adolescents expect people to disclose academic performance with peers who performed at a similar level to their own (Heyman et al, 2008;Zhang et al, 2014).…”

Self-presentational features in childhood social anxiety

“…Parker and Gottman's (1989) careful formulation of the development of peer relations in childhood suggests that children from around 8 years onwards become increasingly concerned about gaining social acceptance into peer groups, and it seems likely that these concerns make social evaluation highly salient for children at this time. In correspondence with this, researchers have reported developmental progress between 6 and 11 years of age in children's use and understanding of various impression management tactics (Bennett & Yeeles, 1990a;Bennett & Yeeles, 1990b;Watling & Banerjee, 2007a;Watling & Banerjee, 2007b). Moreover, children from around 8 years of age become increasingly able to recognize that self-presentational behavior may be adjusted to suit the distinctive preferences of different audiences (Banerjee, 2002b).…”

“…However, some evidence has been found for the use or understanding by elementary school children of ingratiation and self-promotion (e.g., Aloise-Young, 1993;Bennett and Yeeles, 1990;Watling & Banerjee, 2007a), modesty (e.g., Banerjee, 2000;Watling & Banerjee, 2007b), disclaimers (e.g., Bennett, 1990), and excuses (e.g., Juvonen, 1996;Ohbuchi & Sato, 1994). We believe that individual differences in childhood social anxiety may be associated with variability in the tendency to use self-presentational tactics.…”