Concerns with reputation develop at a young age. Children as young as five modify their behavior in order to leave a positive impression on others. For example, when others are watching, children are inclined to act less selfishly in order to avoid punishment or even to attain a reward. In this study, Good & Shaw (2022) further investigated how children use reputational cognition and inferences to predict the behaviors of others within academic and non-academic settings.

The study consisted of approximately 500 children between the ages of 4 and 9. There were five studies, which provided children with scenarios of an intrinsically-motivated (defined as being smart and wanting to learn) character and a reputationally-motivated (defined as wanting to appear smart) character. After listening to the scenarios, students were asked to determine which characters lied about their failures, downplayed their success, and sought help.

The older the participants were, the more likely they were to predict that the character with a reputational motive was 1) more likely to lie about doing poorly on a test, 2) less likely to downplay their success, and 3) less likely to seek help publicly, but more likely to seek help privately. In non-academic settings, such as in a playground, older participants believed that reputationally-motivated students were more likely to lie about doing badly in a game and about cleaning toys. Additionally, older participants demonstrated dislike for the reputationally-motivated character.

Generally, by ages 6-7, children make “adult-like inferences” (p. 431) about people’s behaviors, based on their motives. By this age, children also understand that intrinsic and reputational motivations foster different behaviors. Children younger than five presented inconsistent results, which made it difficult to assess and generalize their concepts of motivation and behavior. The findings were meaningful because they informed researchers about children’s developmental trajectory of reputational inferences, as well as their reputational cognition in assessing how motivation influences behavior.

Although this study focused on young children, the work can be extended to observe help-seeking behavior of high school students that EPIC researchers work with. The findings help us to understand why students do or do not seek help even after experiencing a failure in both academic and non-academic settings.

For more information on this publication, please retrieve it at: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cdev.13711?saml_referrer.

Reference:

Good, K. & Shaw, A. (2022). Being versus appearing smart: Children’s developing intuitions about how reputational motives guide behavior. Child Development, 93(2), 418-436.