Evaluative Audience Perception (EAP): How Children Come to Care About Reputation

Abstract

Despite the fact that reputational concerns are central to human psychology, we know little about when and how children come to care about the evaluation of others. In this article, we review recent studies on reputational concerns in early childhood, and propose that evaluative audience perception (EAP) is necessary to understand the developmental origins of reputation. Specifically, we argue that EAP’s two defining components—the tendency to assume that others could evaluate one’s behavior and the default preference to elicit positive instead of negative evaluations—lay the foundation for the development of reputational concerns. We provide evidence suggesting that EAP would emerge by 24 months and conclude by suggesting possible developmental models of EAP.

Learning to mentalize: A mediational approach for caregivers and therapists.

“…Mediational intervention for sensitizing caregivers offers an interactive social language (the “literacy of interaction”) to establish reliability in this communicative process of knowledge exchange through generating joint attention (Liszkowski, Carpenter, Henning, Striano, & Tomasello, 2004). It achieves this through supporting focusing ; by judicious use of encouragement addressing the child's reputational concerns arising from evaluative audience perception (Botto & Rochat, 2019); through expanding a child's cognitive and affective awareness, taking it beyond the child's immediate perspective (Tomasello, 2018); through affecting/exciting , creating shared positive emotion and meaning around shared objects of interest (Bennett, Larkin, Pincham, Carman, & Fearon, 2018); and, paradigmatically, through regulating behavior by providing effective demonstration (Kiraly, Csibra, & Gergely, 2013). Botto and Rochat (2019, p.182) have recently proposed that “both the early attunement to others’ emotional reaction represented in social referencing, joint attention, and prosocial behavior, and the development of an explicit self‐awareness would underlie children's emerging perception of others as evaluators of the self.”…”

Clinical pointers from developing self‐awareness

“…The developmental paradox is best exemplified in the fact that on one hand, 3‐year‐olds are less prone to lie and less good at it by easily leaking the truth under adult pressure, while on the other hand, when asked to share limited resources like candies or stickers between them and another person, 3‐year‐olds tend overwhelmingly to self‐maximize, hence create blatantly inequitable distributions. This phenomenon is true across many different cultures 27 . Inversely and by contrast, 5‐year‐olds become productive and expert liars, while becoming markedly more inequity‐averse when asked to share resources.…”

“…This phenomenon is true across many different cultures. 27 Inversely and by contrast, 5-year-olds become productive and expert liars, while becoming markedly more inequityaverse when asked to share resources. For example, when asked to distribute an odd number of candies between themselves and another, forced into producing inequity in their distribution, 5-year-olds often resist and even refuse to distribute unequal numbers of candies between the two parties.…”

“…Beyond the first signs of explicit self‐conceptualizing and self‐evaluation through the evaluative eyes of others, in the following months and by the third year, children become increasingly strategic in self‐presentation and self‐image management with the basic propensity to foster positive rather than negative evaluations from others 27 . This propensity leads children to be particularly attuned to what others perceive as being positively versus negatively evaluated.…”

“…36 months: norm and reputation Beyond the first signs of explicit self-conceptualizing and self-evaluation through the evaluative eyes of others, in the following months and by the third year, children become increasingly strategic in self-presentation and self-image management with the basic propensity to foster positive rather than negative evaluations from others. 27 This propensity leads children to be particularly attuned to what others perceive as being positively versus negatively evaluated. This is particularly evident from 36 months with the emergence of children's first propensities to lie and to deceive, 28 in efforts to conceal what they understand as social mischiefs and to avoid reprimands and poor evaluation from others.…”