Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We care tremendously about what other people think of us.Motivated by two lines of prior work – children’s inferentialand communicative capacities and strategic reputation man-agement – we examine how children infer what others thinkof them given others’ observations of their performance, andhow they influence these beliefs through disclosing their per-formance. In Experiment 1, 3-5 year-olds played a luck-basedgame; one confederates watched the child win and anotherconfederate watched the child lose. We asked the child to dis-close an additional, unobserved win to one of the two confed-erates. We find that younger children overwhelmingly choosethe person who previously saw them win. However, as ageincreased, children were more likely to choose to disclose tosomeone who previously saw them lose. In Experiment 2,adults played a similar third person version and selectivelychose the person who saw the main character previously lose.