{"pk":28446,"title":"A friend or a toy? Four-year-olds strategically demonstrate their competence\nto a puppet but only when others treat it as an agent","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Others’ beliefs about the self can powerfully influence our\neveryday interactions with others. Recent work suggests that\neven preschool-aged children are sensitive to what others think\nof the self and actively attempt to manage these beliefs (Asaba\n& Gweon, 2018). What cognitive capacities underlie these\nearly self-presentational behaviors, and in what contexts do\nthese behaviors emerge? Here we show that preschoolers\nstrategically demonstrate their competence to even a puppet,\nbut only when an adult treats the puppet as an agent and\nspecifically asks which toy the child wants to “show” to the\npuppet (Exp.1). However, they do not show such strategic\ndemonstration of their competence when the same puppet is\ntreated as an object (Exp.2). These results suggest that self-\npresentational behaviors can emerge even in the absence of any\nimmediate prospect of social evaluation insofar as children\nconsider the target entity as capable of holding beliefs.\nFurthermore, whether or not children ascribe a belief about the\nself to the target is heavily modulated by how an entity is\ntreated by others. We discuss the relevance of these findings to\nearly reputation management behaviors, and more broadly, the\nuse of make-believe agents in developmental research.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"cognitive development; social cognition; Theory\nof Mind; reputation management; agency"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/24j957nk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Mika","middle_name":"","last_name":"Asaba","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Xiaoqian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Li","name_suffix":"","institution":"Singapore University of Technology and Design","department":""},{"first_name":"W. Quin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yow","name_suffix":"","institution":"Singapore University of Technology and Design","department":""},{"first_name":"Hyowon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gweon","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28446/galley/18317/download/"}]}