2007-2009

• Research has shown that people often try to control their behaviour in order to shape the impression that other people have of them. For example, as adults we are aware that saying the ‘right’ thing in a job interview might make us look better than the competition.
• Recent work with children suggests that the desire to control their public image in this way appears from around the age of eight years, but little is known about younger children’s understanding of this important skill.
• Our study looked at four- to eight-year-old children’s reasoning about how doing or saying certain things can make somebody else think about them in a particular way. We asked them to think about this in the context of breaking rules. The study looked at two types of rules that could be broken: moral and social-conventional.
• Examples of moral rule-breaking include theft and violence; people usually think about these sorts of acts in terms of consequences for others and fairness. When moral rules are broken, other people usually respond by focusing on the victim.
• Examples of social-conventional rule-breaking include behaviours that are not considered ‘normal’ for the situation or for the person’s gender, such as boys playing with Barbie dolls or going shopping wearing pyjamas; people usually think about these sorts of acts in terms of how they disrupt order in society and ‘playing by the rules’. When social-conventional rules are broken, other people usually respond by focusing on the rule-breaker, e.g., by laughing at them.

• How well do children under eight years old understand that they can select the things they do or say to affect how others see them?
• Because audiences tend to focus on the rule-breaker when social-conventional rules are broken, are these situations particularly important for this type of understanding?

• We spoke to 91 children (51 female) aged between four and eight. Children heard eight stories in which they were asked to imagine intentionally breaking rules: four moral, four social-conventional.
• The moral stories involved: hitting someone, snatching a book, stealing a pencil case, and breaking someone’s jigsaw.
• The social-conventional stories involved: eating spaghetti with fingers, dyeing hair green, burping during story time, and wearing a new swimming costume to school in winter.

• Children at all ages showed a clear differentiation between moral and social-conventional rules: breaking moral rules was seen as less ‘okay’ and more ‘bad’ than breaking social-conventional rules.
• Negative emotions such as sadness and anger were more likely following moral rule-breaking, and they increased with age. In addition, feeling sorry and saying sorry were both more likely following moral rule-breaking.
• Older children were more likely to report ‘social’ emotions (those implying a concern with how they are seen by others), e.g. embarrassment. For children from Year 1 onwards, this was especially likely when social-conventional rules were broken.
• Children tended to justify what they would do and say after breaking moral rules by saying that the act was bad or by referring to its impact on others’ feelings.
• With increasing age, children made more references to social evaluation, i.e. a concern with what other children would think about them. This was seen in responses such as “they might laugh at me” and “they would think I’m a stupid boy”. For children from Year 1 onwards, this was especially likely when social-conventional rules were broken.

• Children as young as four showed some concern with social emotions and social evaluation. However, the increasing concern with both of these between the ages of four and eight suggests that older children were more likely to think about how their behaviour could affect others’ impressions of them.
• From Year 1 onwards, both of these things were seen primarily when social-conventional rules were broken, suggesting that this type of situation is particularly important in children’s learning about how to manage their public image.