Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with part two in our series on pretend play, meaning play that involves non literal action. Now, this is really one of our series where I think if you haven't heard part one, I would really recommend you go back and listen to that one first, because we really laid the groundwork there. We establish a lot of the definitions and
so forth. But as a brief refresher, in part one, Rob and I talked about our own memories of pretend play from our own childhood as well as our experiences of pretend to play as parents, especially centering out around the kind of play that happens in preschool age, you know, around three to five or so, which, according to the researchers is sort of the high season of pretend play, when the most pretending is happening usually though, of course,
we also talked about the ways that play extends throughout the lifetime. Even pretend play, you know, it starts before
this period goes beyond it. But the preschool age is when the pretending is coming thick and fast, and we characterized what a lot of that play is, Like Robert, I don't remember if we ever got into this in the previous episode, but one thing I was reflecting on before we started today is not just how much my two year old daughter loves engaging in pretend play with you know, her various dinosaurs, kind of doing imaginary tasks and going to imaginary events and things like that, but
also gets so dedicated to pretend play that like it is a tragedy and an emergency if she is asked to stop pretending before she's done.
Yeah again. I think that's one of the wonders of childhood, is that they just get so they go all on their imaginative play, and you know it's it's enviable. Though I think we can sometimes relate. We can sometimes relate to being thrown out of our own creative, imaginative endeavors without enough warning, without a five minute warning from life. Parents at least tend to give that five to ten minute warning if they can.
I think the thing about pretending is if you're deep enough in it, you can be given the warning and then you just forget and you know it doesn't stick.
Yeah, it's like falling back into a dream. Yeah yeah, yeah.
But anyway, in the last episode, we also looked in depth at a paper sort of scientific overview, published in a cognitive science review that was looking at the state of research on pretend play in children. That paper was by a researcher named Dina Skolnik Weisberg, published in twenty fifteen. It was just called pretend Play and it was sort of a review of research on pretend play, especially as
it relates to other developing cognitive skills in childhood. So in the last episode we talked about the paper's discussion of the possible relationships of pretend play to symbolic understanding and also to counterfactual reasoning. Today, I want to return to another idea explored in this paper, and that is
the relationship of pretend play to theory of mind. This is a concept that's come up on the show many times before, but to define it again here, theory of mind is the ability to recognize that other entities like other people and animals, have their own internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions. And theory of mind is also the understanding that other people's mental states are independent of one's own. So it's not that everybody
is sad because I'm sad right now. The other people different things are happening in their minds. Born with theory of mind skills, the ability to imagine and model the mental states of other people is something that is acquired and refined throughout childhood.
Yeah, and it's this is of course the topic that's come up on the show multiple times before and what'll keep coming up because it's a huge part of the human condition and it's it's so fascinating to think about. It's one of those things that we use all the time to the point that we we just we think of it as just reality, and we think of what we know of others' mental states and what we attribute to other people's mental states as being just how people are.
You know, we think we know them, but in reality, like the whether we're dealing with the closest relationships in your life. You know, a significant other is family members, offspring, and so forth, whether you're dealing with them, or you're dealing with someone you just met on the street or didn't even meet someone that was walking across the street
from you. We we create a simulation of their mind state of what they're you know, roughly, their their goals, their attitudes towards us generally are, and and then we react to the to those models. And so it is it is kind of interesting, kind of haunting to think about the fact that, like the you that I think I know best is actually inside of me. Yes, you know. And and of course theory of mind can be trained on plenty of non human entities as well on objects
and on real things. Uh So it's a very powerful part of the human cognition tool chest.
That's right, it's a you know, I was just thinking about how theory of mind is so deep in such different types of sort of human relations and expression. Like theory of mind is is the core of love, of what it means to love people, but it's also the core of like manipulation and machiavelianism. It's it's everywhere.
Yeah, Yeah, it's involved in in all of our prejudices. It's involved, you know, in in our hatred as well as our love. So it's you know, it's it's a very broad spectrum here.
Yeah. So it's I think easy to see why theory of mind might have connections to pretend play. When you play a pretend game, especially with other people, it is important to understand the intentions of the play partner in order to understand the game as non literal. So this is an example game I mentioned in part one. Why is my friend stirring a bowl of crayons with a fork and then lifting the fork to my stuffed therapod dinosaur's mouth. This activity does not make any sense when
just observed and taken literally. But if I'm a child and I see this happening, even without talking about the game, I can probably infer that my friend intends the crayons to be understood as food. You know, last time we talked about crayons as spaghetti, and thus intends the forklifting to be understood as feeding, and thus intends the inert
stuffed dinosaur to be understood as eating. So I can participate in this play by feeding the dinosaur spaghetti crayons as well, or by making nomnom sounds when the crayon reaches the dinosaur's mouth. And about this connection, Weisberg writes in the paper quote pretense is thus meta representational, meaning it involves representing someone's representation of a state of affairs. Without the ability to meta represent one would see pretense
actions as nonsensical and quarantining would break down. And remember from last time, quarantining is the ability to stop yourself from taking inapplicable lessons from pretend play. So the example was, mom is using a banana as a phone. Somehow we can play that pretend a game and yet not take the incorrect lesson that you can actually make calls on a banana. It's the ability to ward off incorrect information and prevent your brain from learning things that are wrong
based on a game that is counterfactual. And so what Weisberg is saying here is that things like quarantining are only possible because we have this meta representational ability. Like you can see somebody playing the banana as phone game, and you don't think that, oh, maybe the banana can place calls because you understand that person's intentions that they're just intending this to be a game. They're not intending
to use the banana literally as a phone. In my example, I guess the equivalent would be like are we feeding the dinosaur crayons? Because crayons are actually food? Should I eat them? Sometimes a kid may experiment along these lines, but usually they do not end up at this conclusion. Usually the kid understands the intention of the play partner to treat the crayons as something other than what they actually are.
I do have to say that after we recorded the last episode, there were a number of phone banana shenanigans in my household. Oh n it totally killed. It's just inherently funny. So I hope listeners have been re exploring the comedy as well.
I mean, that's funny no matter what age are. Absolutely Oh but to talk about killing the joke by over explaining it, nevertheless, I'm gonna go there. I would love to understand better the like the minute mechanics of that kind of humor, Like how close physically does the fruit or the food have to be to the object to like work enough to be funny, because obviously it's like a banana is funnier than like a plastic toy phone.
But I would also think a banana as a phone is funnier than an apple as a phone.
Yeah, I mean a banana is stupid. A banana, I mean, don't get me wrong, is delicious, But a banana is bright yellow. There's thull slipping on the peel clown Shenan. Again, it is phallic and therefore has that layer of humor to it as well. And then the juxtaposition is that a phone is serious. A phone, you know, it may be a loved when calling, but you may be bad news on the other end of the phone. The phone is what you reach for when there's an emergency, So
the phone is dead serious or can be. The banana is stupid and therefore it just works.
It's so good, but anyway, Okay, to come back to playing pretend and theory of mind, the connections we've talked about suggests there is a link between theory of mind and playing pretend because it's about recognizing and internally modeling the mental states of others, recognizing not just what another
person literally does, but understanding what that person intends. And Weisberg compares this to a common experiment that is used to test theory of mind in children, which he refers to as the Sally Anne false belief task, though or sometimes in the literature they just call this a false belief test. Here's a simplified version of it. Okay, the
child is a participant. The child watches a character playing with a ball, and then this character puts the ball down in a basket and walks out of the room. And then while the original character who is playing with the ball is gone, somebody else comes into the room, takes the ball out of the basket, hides it in a box, and then leaves. Then the first character comes back into the room, and the child has been watching
the whole time, so the child saw everything happen. And then you ask the child a question, where will the original character look for the ball? So the child knows, because they were watching the whole time, that the ball
is hidden in the box. But with theory of mind skills, the child should be able to say that the character should look in the basket where she left it, because the child knows that the character does not know that the ball was moved or where it was moved too, So to answer this question correctly, the child in the experiment has to ignore their own knowledge about the true state of affairs and instead answer based on the false
belief that the character in the scenario would have. If you compare this to the pretend play scenario, if a kid wants to join in the crayons as spaghetti game with another child. They have to ignore the true knowledge that the crayons are crayons and that they are meant for drawing and not for eating, and also to infer the intentions of the play partner that the crayons are
to be treated as food for the dinosaur. So both of these situations pretend play and the false belief test for theory of mind depend on at least two things
that Weisberg highlights. One of them is what she calls decoupling, and that is temporarily ignoring your knowledge of what is literally true, and the other is meta representation, internally representing somebody else's mental states, such as their intention to represent a literal object X as pretend object y. So it's very tempting to see a link between theory of mind
and pretend play. Weisberg in fact cites a researcher named A. M. Leslie who has speculated in some writing that there is possibly an underlying neural structure in the brain that is responsible for both theory of mind and for pretending, calling this hypothetical structure the theory of mind module. Leslie apparently argued that perhaps a developmental difference in this neural structure
is what underlies autism. Given the observation that studies have found that children with autism spectrum diagnoses demonstrate deficits in social cognition, which implicates theory of mind, but also tend to engage in less pretending. Both the existence of this module and the connection with the autism spectrum is hypothetical. What's clear is the cognitive and behavioral similarity between theory
of mind and elements of pretend play. And then Weisberg goes on to site some studies that seem to support this link. I thought a couple of these were kind of interesting. One of them is by researchers named Rebecca Dore and Angeline Lillard, published in Imagination, Cognition, and Personality in twenty fifteen called Theory of Mind and Children's Engagement
in Fantasy Worlds. This was a study that looked at preschoolers at the beginning and then the end of a seven month period, and it tested for a few different things to see if there are any correlations. One was a child's tendency to engage in fantasy ideation and activities, so this would be related to pretending. Basically, a child's orientation toward fantasy. And then another thing measured was the
child's tendency to use mentalistic descriptions. I had to look up what this is, but I think this basically means, like, imagine you see a drawing of a character reaching a
bucket down into a pool of water. You could give a physical description of that scene, you know, the character is leaning down scooping up water, or you could give a mentalistic description, which might be something like this character wants a drink of water, explaining things in terms of motivations and mental states as opposed to just physical movements.
And then the third thing tested for correlation here was the child's capacity for theory of mind, which is tested a variety of ways, one of which is the false belief task that I was talking about a minute ago, but another is testing for whether children understand that different people have desires and emotions they're different from their own,
things like that. And this study found that preschool children who are more oriented toward fantasy on a number of measures did not grow beyond the baseline in the use of mentalistic descriptions during the seven month period, but did show some greater improvements in theory of mind, so that establishes that there could possibly be a link between the tendency to engage in fantasy and faster learning on theory
of mind skills. Another finding is that some experiments have found that children do better on false belief tasks like the ball in the basket versus the box thing I was talking about when the format of the test involves more pretending. So think of when the scenario is presented as a fictional story or when it is acted out with invisible pretend objects as opposed to being acted out with literal physical props, in which case apparently the kids do a bit worse. That kind of makes sense to me.
I guess it's harder to ignore your knowledge that the ball is actually in the box and remember that Sally left it in the basket and that's all she knows when oh my god, like I just saw the go in the box. I literally saw it go in there. There.
It is.
Also interesting is there are apparently some findings that suggest this is actually in adults, that reading fiction may possibly improve particular theory of mind skills.
I remember reading about this several years back. I believe yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now, as with the stuff discussed in the previous episode with the links to symbolic understanding and counterfactual reasoning. Weisberg adds the important caveat that basically all of these experiments connecting theory of mind to pretend play are correlational or
they're limited to a single situation. It's really hard, maybe impossible, to devise an ethical, robust experiment where you like randomly manipulate the independent variable of pretend to play over a developmentally significant period of time and then track the results. Both ethics and practicality kind of limit us to weaker forms of testing in this subject matter, So we should be realistic and thus humble about the limitations of what
we know about these links. So what we know is very interesting, but it's also fairly tentative and important to not hang too much on these findings, especially the findings of a single study. But with those caveats, I think there's pretty good reason to think that pretending and theory of mind are deeply intertwined in some ways in the brain and in child development, But exactly how they are related,
how one affects the other, and so forth, is more questionable. Now, the kind of theory of mind that we have been primarily talking about, of course, is inferring the mental states of other people who do physically exist. But a different related question is what about simulating the workings of an external mind that is at its base life make believe. And this brings us back to something we mentioned only briefly in Part one, the imaginary friend.
Yeah, in some ways, the imaginary friend is it's like the ultimate pretend play manifestation, an imaginary being that is altogether imaginary and invisible also, but it's also gifted with varying degrees of agency and intelligence. This you know this, This, of course gets more complicated when you try and like nail down what an imaginary friend is. There are sort of related concepts that are sometimes looped together and sometimes
are considered separate. Like, for instance, you have things like stuffed animals that are attributed personalities in some degree of agency. You also have personified objects, and you also have also sometimes there's a distinction between imaginary companions and imaginary friends. I'll come back to that in a bit, but I guess a good place to star art would be with examples from our own lives. Joe, did you have an imaginary friend? And does your child have an imaginary friend or friends.
This may get into some of the distinctions you were just highlighting, But I never had like a consistent imaginary friend over time. I think I may have had single use imaginary friends that were, you know, dreamed up for a single play occasion or something. With my daughter, I don't think there's not a single entity who is her consistent imaginary friend. But she does seem to ascribe a lot of personality to various pretend entities, like imbuing mind
into stuffed animal friends or imagining. We sometimes play this game with these invisible kitty cats and stuff that you know, we can find like hiding between the couch cushions and things, and we pull out an invisible kitty cat, and oh and she can talk about what the kitty cat wants. But I think that's different than an imaginary friend, which is usually thought of as something that persists over time.
Well, I mean, yes, yes, and no. I guess one thing that that sort of comes out of the research I've been looking looking at here is that I think imaginary friends do come and go, and they inevitably do come and then go. There is kind of like a period of time during which they tend to be active. But there's not necessarily like we shouldn't get too attach to the idea that they'll just be a single imaginary friend.
There could be several and they need not be this sort of you know, standard version of some sort of essentially invisible friend, an invisible humanoid being that is like on the same level as your as your child. And also they might just spring out of nowhere, as we'll get into a bit. But yeah, I myself have no memory of ever having an invisible friend, just despite the fact that I was I was the oldest child and in many respects the eldest child that seemed to be
more likely to have an imaginary friend. My own child had be and lost friends that I remember, and so I asked them about this, is like, do you remember your being lost friends? And they were like, no, I don't remember the being wast friends at all. I remember three imaginary cats that I had at one point. I'm like, okay, well I forgot about that one. So that's another thing to keep in mind when you think about like single imaginary friends that a child may or may not have
a lot of. It also comes down to what memories are retained by the child. And what is noticed and retained by the parents, and so it's entirely likely between those two things that hold imaginary friends are lost entirely. So yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. It's funny.
My daughter has also gone through phases where she was really obsessed with bees. She loves bees and has you know, likes to point out bees flying around things that aren't always bees, you know. Sometimes there might just be a buzz or something, you know, made by a machine and it's like b b yeah.
Yeah, So like my child to be in West friends. I don't think they really talked or anything. They just they were essentially animals that were invisible, you know. I also asked my mom about this. I was on the phone with her last night and I was just checking. It's like, you know, it was like me and my siblings, none of us had invisible friends that you know of, right, And she's like no, But she shared that she had seven imaginary friends when she was a child. Oh and
she was the eldest child. This would have been the I guess the early fifties. So that'll be worth keeping in mind as we proceed through the discussion here. Wow, so one of the sources I was looking at for this. This was a twenty eighteen meta analysis Prevalence of Imaginary Companions in children, a meta analysis by Morigucci and Toto. This was in the Meryll Palmer Quarterly, and they pointed out for starters that imaginary friends don't have to be
entirely invisible. Some experts point out that a particular object, and even a personified object, may seemingly enhance the vividness of an imagined companion. They also discussed imaginary friends and personified objects as both being forms of imaginary companions, but stressed that a key difference one tends to find is that the relationship between child and personified object tends to be more more of a matter of like, these are my pets or you know, or these are my children,
you know. It's a relationship that's mirroring human child and human pet relationships. While an imaginary friend is more egalitarian. You don't tell them what to do because they're your friend. They're at least you're equal. It's not someone you boss around or care for. I want to add that into because I don't want to. I don't want to create this idea that you know, bossy kids just have these
these underlings that are imaginary. It's like, you know, it could also be a care scenario and so forth, but the imaginary friend it is more egalitarian in its nature.
Yeah, that is really interesting. I wonder if that has to do with I don't know, ideas about like when you when a physical object is yours, there's this state of mind about it that like you own it, it is one of my possessions. And thus even if it is a even if it has a mind, you kind of feel like this this power over it, where whereas you don't with you know, other people your age, or I guess you shouldn't with other people your age. So like imagining an invisible person is different.
Yeah, yeah, like it's my object, it is mine, but also mine to care for and so forth. Yeah. I also know that some researchers consider personified objects to be imaginary friends, but not always. Again, we have to remind yourself that this is all This is all adult language that has been generated to make sense of the thing that is emerging, often unlanguaged from the minds of children. So you know, bear that in mind as we move forward.
Now they briefly touch on the history of imaginary friends, with the study of them first popping up in eighteen ninety five with the work of Clara Vostrowski A Study of Imaginary Companions. And yeah, but before this, there's basically nothing. They were. For a while, following the emergence of study regarding them, they were often thought to be signs of
a personality dysfunction. The first book wasn't written about them until nineteen eighteen, and it wasn't until the nineteen sixties that imaginary friends were seen as a positive part of a child's development. This is universally so, like, for instance, just going back to the example of my mother, like her parents embraced this idea and would like set places at the table for the seven imaginary children. So it's not a situation where it's like, oh, until the nineteen sixties,
imaginary friends were to be feared or anything. But just you know, broad strokes. Now, one question you might have is like, Okay, well, what does this mean. Does this mean that nobody had imaginary friends before the twentieth century. Well, that is actually one way you could look at it,
and we'll get into that. But the other way is that clearly this is something that's just been going on since time out of mind, and it's only as we get into the twentieth century that it's being noticed and so forth.
I think sometimes we underestimate how much things in the past just there's not written evidence of them, not because they didn't exist, but because nobody who was writing books just thought it was worth paying attention to.
I think there's a strong case to be made for that absolutely now. Claus and Pasmano point out in two thousand and sevens per ten Companions. I've seen this sighted and numerous studies as well, that the idea of childhood as we understand it today perhaps didn't really emerge until like the seventeenth century. So there were perhaps severe limitations on our ability and our willingness to understand what was
going on with children. So, you know, did we care what children were talking about, did we care about if they had an imaginary friend or not? And so forth. On top of that, before the seventeenth century we deep ever deeper in of course, into the demon haunted world of superstition. So you know, if we did hear about our children talking with unseen entities, we probably had a script to go to that was not Oh well, they're
just engaging in pretend play. It might be more, Oh, well they're talking to fairies, they're talking to spirits and so forth.
Yeah, the goat whispered something to me, help.
Me, they write quote. Many early descriptions of pretend companions may not be recognized as such because they were depicted in terms of spirits and other supernatural concepts. Metaphysical explanations for pretend companions are not at all limited to the past, because to some extent they have existed even in recent
times now. They also bring up the idea that free play time and time alone are perhaps both key requirements for their emergence of an invisible companion and a child, and these would have been things that would have been, by some estimates, historically lacking and still lacking for children in many parts of the world and in many different
socioeconomic levels. You know, do you have time alone? Do you have time to play in which you'd get to know your imaginary friend, in which you had been able to be able to generate this idea and play with it.
They cite works from two thousand and three and nineteen seventy nine that report at a very low rate of reported invisible friends in India zero point two percent in one study, which is really low compared to some of the ways Western stats that I'll mention here in a bit, and they attributed it to limited playtime and limited alone time.
They also acknowledge that the idea of children remembering past lives is something that is sometimes explored and encouraged in parts of India, but that didn't seem to have an impact on the percentage rate of imaginary friends here. So they bring up this idea that in the past, and to some extent in the present, traditional ways of life throughout the world might not have allowed most children sufficient room for not only imaginary friends, but even imagination play itself. Now.
One of the sources they cite here on this is the work of Lloyd de Moss from nineteen seventy four The History of Childhood, writing that quote, if pretend companions are indeed a modern phenomenon, then their genesis may result from being left alone and from having time available for play, customs that apply to contemporary Western children but rarely to children historically. Now quick side note on de Moss here,
who lived nineteen thirty one through twenty twenty. He was a psychoanalyst and self proclaimed psychohistorian, and there remains some controversy about his work, and I've read some strong criticisms of his scholarship, especially concerning some of his more bombastic ideas. I'm not super well versed in his work, but at any rate, the key idea of his involved here is the notion that childhood in the modern Western sense is relatively new.
Okay, but that sort of contributes to one of these competing explanations for why it's only recently that there has been much published on the idea of imaginary companions in childhood. It could be that, you know, this is something that happens with lots of kids throughout time, but it's only really been noticed by adults who wrote about it in
the last century or so. Or it could be that the very nature of childhood itself changes pretty drastically in different times and cultures, and this is something that emerges much, which more strongly in recent times in certain cultures.
Yeah. Yeah, so, I feel we have like a few different ways to potentially think about it. As something that was long and visible to adults, had at least less space to foster and children, and was likely to be explained away with superstition anyway, if superstition was even employed, Like I said, I think there's also a strong argument to be made that it just wasn't noticed as much and wasn't fostered as an idea, wasn't even recognized. And we'll come back to some ideas regarding that here in
a second. But another interesting idea they bring up is that while historical accounts of imaginary friends and children from before the twentieth century is scant and non existent, we have plenty of accounts of quote adult pretend companion like phenomena. This includes muses, household gods, guardian angels, and personal saints.
I'd also personally add ghosts and ancestor spirits to this, and I think it's something that many contemporary humans will also find themselves engaging with, at least to some degree. You know, when we speak to the dead, and I don't mean even in like a daily regular fashion, but like if you visit somebody's grave and you speak to them, and on some level you know you were engaging with this mental model of their mind. You know, what are you really speaking to it? You're speaking to this imaginary
construct that person. No longer exists in a physical form, you know. So, yeah, you are engaging in a very similar sort of pretend play, but we think of it differently, you know, we have a different We have an adult mindset regarding it, and so we don't loop it in. We don't lump it into the same category with the imaginary friend usually. Now, in this meta analysis, they point out that numerous studies have made a case for invisible
friends and invisible companions. I'm sorry, imaginary friends and imaginary companions, but they're often invisible having a beneficial effect on a child's social, emotion, emotional, and cognitive development. Just a few of the possible attributed benefits in the meta analysis include children with ices or imaginary companions may have more developed
sociocognitive and narrative skills. Children with ices may go on to have better coping competence as adolescents, that is, better coping strategies and techniques when faced with anxiety, such as reaching out for help or advice when they need it.
Oh, that's interesting. I was wondering if that might take a different form, which is that I wonder if having an imaginary companion just kind of trains you in engaging in a back and forth within your own mind, which is very important for kind of getting perspective on yourself
in your own situation. Even as an adult. You might not have another person, you imagine, but you sort of do need to be able to ask and answer questions within yourself or to set up opposite uditional viewpoints within your own head in order to sort of stand outside yourself and see what's going on.
Yeah, I'm getting a strong sense that you could look at it as a kind of simulation or rehearsal for social relationships and communication as well. Yeah. Yeah, there's a twenty fourteen study from Gleason and Kalpedo that they point out that found that children with egalitarian child icy relationships chose more constructive coping strategies than did those with these child icy relationships that are more like you know pet or you know child you know care relationship. So yeah,
it's it's interesting to think about here. Now, one thing they point out, and this is a huge factor, and this of course is often a factor in studies, is that is that pretty much all of our scholarship on ICs has come out of Western culture, where there is generally a majority of children with ICs of one or another, and so you have to ask, and again this is you know, this is a problem in other studies as well, obviously scientific and otherwise, like what's your your sample consists of.
Is it a bunch of you know, western college students, Is it a bunch of white western college students and so forth? Then how does that break down when you're actually considering the species as a whole, And so you know, you can ask yourself, well, how much of this is purely cultural then? And it's hard to say, they point out because at the time, at any rate, they said they had virtually nothing outside of Western culture to compare
these studies to. And I think this has changed a little bit since the publication date, but I think a lot of big questions remain. They did point to some Japanese studies at the time, however, and these seem to suggest that imaginary companions might be less common in Japanese children, apparently due to cultural reasons, though the rate was still something like fifty percent. So it's so it's just that's compared to sixty to sixty five percent rate in studies
of Western children. So you know, it's a sizable difference, but you're still looking at fifty percent. Obviously there's a great deal to unravel there. In their meta analysis, they further elaborate the cultural attitudes towards imaginary friends are likely important here in Japan, for instance, they said there was at the time less common knowledge of the concept and perhaps more of a likelihood for imaginary friend reports from a child to generate a prinal concern, despite, to be clear,
a strong support for pretend play in general in said culture. So, yeah, it gets complex trying to tease a part like, well, how much of it is a cultural factor, how much of it is just in parents paying attention and so forth. So they summarize, quote, imaginative and pretend play maybe universal behaviors across cultures with an evolutionary origin, but how the play is constructed in shape varies across culture is unclear. Now, other factors that seem to impact things. These include the
children's age, the assessment method, sex, and birth order. So on the subject of age, Looking at various studies involving imaginary friends, some studies identify two to three and a half as the peak age for imaginary companions, while others have identified age four. Some studies they argue, do not distinguish between current and past imaginary companions, and I think that's interesting to think of as welcome. I honestly do not remember at what age my child had been WASP friends,
but clearly there was a window for it. You know.
Yeah, you're never too old for WASP friends, but at a certain age they just become less common. It's harder to get in touch now.
They also stress the assessment method is key. So broadly speaking, you can ask kids about their imaginary friends and or talk to their parents about their imaginary friends. And I don't think this will shock any parents out there, but sometimes the accounts do not match up. Parents often don't have or attain all the details, and parents who disapprove of my imaginary friends, either in general or specifics like I don't trust mister Bongo or whatever, they may retain
even less of the details. However, while the children themselves may be the best source, they are also complications there as well. They point out that below age three, a child may not have the verbal skills to answer all of the questions that the researchers have about the imaginary friends, and they may wind up answering questions by invoking real life friends instead, like you're asking them about imaginary friends, but they're answering. They get confused about whether you're talking
about imaginary friends or real friends. And then I found this particularly funny. They may make up new imaginary friends during the interview.
Yeah, well, yeah, there is sometimes a blurring of I'm just thinking about my daughter, like playing with toys. You know, she's got her dinosaurs and like little dogs and cats are and they're sitting around having a party or something. And then sometimes she will identify some of them as real people in her life. It's like, oh, now this is mama, and this is data, and these are the grandparents, and these are my friends from down the street and so forth.
Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, their imagination is fertile, and they will create angels and demons for you at the drop of a hat. So many studies therefore focused on both children and parents. And then compare the notes also
key sex and birth order. On the birth order side of thing, firstborns and presumably singletons are most likely to have imaginary friends something like two point eight times more likely in the meta analysis, presumably because they lack for true childhood companions or more likely to lack for true childhood companions within the household. On the sex side of the conundrum, there's a lot of work to work out here as well, and what we do have it tends
to entail a lot of gender norms. Additionally, it's possible that there are different prime ages for imaginary friends between boys and girls, and not every study reports sex differences anyway. Now, I want to get into a more specific question that came up for me on this topic, and it came up because it's the title of a paper I ran across from twenty twelve published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion by Jay Bradley Weiger, Katrina Paxson,
and Lacy Ryan, What do Invisible Friends Know? And this of course leans heavily into questions of theory of mind. Ah.
Yeah, it all comes back.
In this study. The author's question thirty six children ages two through eight with imaginary friends at the time on what sorts of things their imaginary companions knew essentially on a sliding scale, with dog at one end and God at the other and humanity you know, somewhere in the middle. And they found that younger children attributed knowledge to all agents considered here, while older children treated God differently from all the others, but that imaginary friends, the imaginary friend
was also different from either human or dog. In other words, it kind of stands as this in between character. And I was thinking about this, and I realized, you know, it kind of reminded me of the nineteen eighty eight film My Neighbor Totoro by Hyo Miyazaki. In this, if you haven't seen it, two young girls in the Japanese countryside encounter friendly nature spirits in the form of Toto's as well as a cat bus. And it does not
expressly deal with him as imaginary friends. But if we were to think of the Totos as imaginary friends, you know what, did they seem to know? What is their mindset? They do not seem to have the mind of an all knowing or all seeing God. They don't really talk. They are certainly in many ways like animals, but they're
clearly not animals, either wild or domestic. They're also not people, and they're not, to invoke another Miyazaki creature, They're not like Kiki's feline companion Jigi in Kiki's Delivery Service, who is a cat who speaks with the human voice. The totos seem to have their own category, much like what we're discussing here.
When you were talking about the invisible companions with children attributing knowledge to them, that's kind of an in between place. Did you mean most often somewhere in between human knowledge and omniscience, like knowing more than a normal human would, but less than an omniscient God. Or did you mean somewhere between the human and the dog level of knowledge.
Nos, well, we'll discuss between human and God.
Okay.
So I wasn't able to get a hold of the full study, but the lead author, Jay Bradley Wiger, later wrote a book titled Invisible Companions, and he discusses the study in that book. So here's a taste of it. In one of the studies experiments, the children who all came from various Christian denominations, so they had this, you know, just varying degrees, some idea of what God is within that cultural belief system, and then they engaged in three They were asked to engage in three different theory of
mind tasks. So in one of the theory of mind tasks, the children had what is called an occluded picture study, so you can think of it this way. You have a full picture inside of a folder, like a folding folder, and then there's a little window cut in the folder so that you just get a little sliver of the full picture, and then you ask the child, can you guess what the full picture is? And the children were
very confident. This is something like sixty three percent of them said that they knew what the whole picture was. They're like, oh, yeah, I know what it is, and they made wild guesses. They didn't none of them got it. But that's not really the point here. It's about what they thought they knew. But here's where it gets interesting. Fifty three percent said that their best friend, this is like a real person would know what the picture was as well, So that's less so sixty three for them,
fifty three percent for their friends. Forty four percent said a dog would know, and ninety percent said that God would know, and the imaginary friend sixty seven percent. So imaginary friends were quote slightly more likely to know than everyone except God.
Okay, they know a little bit more than I do, a good bit more than my friends at school, even more than a dog, but not as much as God. Though I also find it interesting that there were ten percent of children here who believed in God but thought God would not know what was in the folder.
Yeah. Yeah, even God cannot see inside his foulder, so that's that's yeah. But yeah, by and large, the imaginary friends stood in between human perception and the perception of God. Interesting, So that's yeah, that's fascinating.
Privileged and knowledge, not omnisciens, but heightened missions.
Yeah. Now, once the picture was revealed, it turned out to be an elephant on a ball. Couldn't get a sense of this at all really from the preview, the children found it funny, and given decent theory of mind, would then be able to conclude that their best friend and dog would also surely fail to guess what it was.
And in the book why your comments on this? And then kind of Wax is poetic about the idea and writes quote, this was not magic to them, It was the way things are anything, everything is nested, there is always more. And so it goes on to praise the resiliency of a child's mind when presented with the awareness of more, you know, like their understanding of the world is continually challenged, corrected and expanded upon, and you know.
When he was pointing this out in the book, it's like I was like, yeah, like that's the kind of thing that most stubborn adults, it would just break them. Most adults are too stubborn too, I feel like to really learn much, at least in certain areas of their life. But like, that is what childhood is. It's constantly being finding out that, oh I didn't understand this, and now I have a broader understanding of what it is, but still being confident enough to think, you know what the
picture is. You know, it's like a special kind of optimism. That's beautiful.
And yeah, the horrors of adulthood that what it really means is like becoming rigid enough that you refuse to be corrected even when you're shown.
Yeah. Yeah, But the big take I'm here for the authors was that imaginary friends or invisible friends were in between entities, that they were positioned in their knowledge somewhere between the individual and God. And again, I think it's worth stressing that these children were all to varying degrees, brought up within a worldview in which an all knowing and all seeing God is very much a I don't think that they explored the way this might have influenced things,
at least not in what I read. But instead they stress that while they were all likely told to some degree what God knows and sees, they were left to their own devices to figure out what their imaginary friend would know. And this is where the author shares some interesting ideas. Quote, perhaps their invisibility itself is important. The physicality of humans and dogs is what creates limits in
perspective and knowledge. At least the older children might reason, perhaps invisible figures enjoy the privileges of not being so limited because they don't have ordinary bodies.
Yeah, I agree. I think that is a strong intuition that a lot of people have. Again, I don't know if this is cultural conditioning based on the way we normally think about the metaphysics of ghosts and angels and beings like that, or if it's something deeper in the brain, but I do think we tend to think that if a being is invisible, it's not limited by the laws of physics, and thus can see beyond walls and has access to information that we can't access.
Yeah. Yeah, Like he goes on to speculate that these kids are spontaneously attributing special knowledge to their invisible friends in a way that suggests quote a deep bias in our theory of mind, one that makes beliefs about God's mind easy to affirm and pass along. And you know, and yet to your point, I feel like we don't even necessarily need to invoke like a you know, ideas
of a Christian God in all of this. You know, you consider such notions as the Evil Eye, which in some traditions is held to be this manevolent force that will hear you if you boast of your blessings too loudly, that will seek you out and curse you. You know, invisible, its powers of detection seem rather boundless, such that you
choose your words carefully in every instance. And you know, there are similar concepts as well of Santa Claus, though not invisible and does kind of take on this sort of invisible status outside of Christmas Eve itself, right, and you're told that he sees all. You know, He's like the Eye of Providence, always watching, all seeing, all knowing.
Well, it also makes me wonder about the effect on beliefs like this of different types of characters in our storytelling and media. So I'm thinking as a counter example to these beings like you know, angels and ghosts and gods that have sort of vague and definite powers, you can wonder what the boundaries of their power are and
you're not really sure. When we have these very concrete superpowered characters like the X Men, you know, so like they have physical bodies and they have powers beyond normal human powers, but also they're clearly limited in all normal human capacities apart from their special powers.
Yeah. Yeah, and then I think in the better examples of your X Men, you know, their special power is also to their detriment. It's also their great flaw. So yeah, it's fascinating to think about. But but yeah, this idea of invisibility uh or disembodiedness having the the effect of greater knowledge it's and being closer to the divine is fascinating as well as this idea that it like it represents a tendency uh in the human psyche to to like lean into these ideas of the unseen world and uh,
and so yeah, it makes you wonder. It's like when when children are engaging in imaginary companions and imaginary friends, like, is this sort of like the raw creative energy that later on in life is used to foster and generate you know, religious ideas and so forth, superstitions and uh and uh. You know, in any of these other examples we mentioned earlier that are prevalent in in adult life to varying degrees, muses, angels, deceased loved ones and so forth.
Or more mundane things like knowing what your spouse wants for their birthday or knowing, you know, what would make your boss happy, or knowing how to write a good character or anything like that.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think there there There are also probably some strong connections to you know, the the continual rise of AI, the use of chatbots and so forth, you know, things that do not have a mind. But as we engage with a language model that responds to our words, we cannot help but attribute a mind to it. We cannot help simulate it, even if we we know on other levels that it's based entirely on what we're inputting, and and you know, we'll at least have some level
of understanding this is not a person. But then it becomes real to us because we're kind of hardwired to do that.
Yeah, you know, this is really not related to our topic today, but some something I would like to come back and revisit at some point is the question of why it is so difficult for me to be rude to an AI chat bot, even when I feel my primary emotion for it is distrust and even antipathy.
You know. Got into that topic a little bit in November in an interview that I did here and Stuff to bliw your mind with Jonathan Birch The Edge of Sentience. You know why I asked, I asked him about this because this is something they discussed a bit in his book, you know, like, what does it mean when I feel like I need to be polite to the to the to the AI, to the chatbot or whatever, or even like the you know, the Google home or whatever you happen to be talking to in your home, Like what
does that mean? And should we be nice to them? And I think the the general wisdom here is yes, you should be. You should be nice to them for a variety of reasons. If for no other reason, like you really need one other thing in your life to be kind of like rude to and and yell at like no, there's probably a better channel for that energy.
Yeah, I mean, I guess now that I think about it, I probably do have an opinion on that, which is that I have some implicit knowledge that what we do, we tend to do more of. So if you teach yourself that it's okay to act some way in a certain situation, even though in that situation there's no actual harm caused, you are training yourself to behave the same way in other similar situations where people would be harmed.
Yeah, the one interesting difference, but that the more that I think about it, the less of a difference it is, and the more of a similarity it is. If you are rude to your imaginary friend, like your imaginary friend has no sentience that is not your own sentience, and therefore on one level you would be rude to no one. But on the other hand, you would be rude to yourself. And I guess on some level, like rudeness is always like self directed. But when you're looking at AI. This
is something that Jonathan Burch brought up. It's eventually, by many estimates, the AI models that we're interacting with will become sentient, and we won't necessarily be able to tell when that occurs. So there will be if someone is just like one hundred percent rude to all AI computer chatbots and so forth, Google homes and what have you,
and they just stuck to that at one point. At some point, possibly they're going to be rude to a sentient being that humans have created and like, and that crosses over into a different level of rudeness and meanness and what have you.
This is a question that's come up before. I don't know where I am on that right now. I guess I lean more skeptical about the I don't know why. It's just an intuition at this point. I'm leaning more skeptical these days on AI sentience. But even if my current gut feeling is right about that, I do think it is the case that being mean to the machine just teaches you to be mean and it helps you be mean to people later.
Yeah, and for me anyway, I think that's the bigger take home.
Yeah yeah, all right, Well, I think that does it for today's episode. But we got a lot more to say about Pretend to Play, So we will be back with at least a part three and perhaps more beyond that.
That's right, So stay tuned and tune in for those episodes, and in the meantime, of course, we want to hear about your imaginary friends, your personified objects from your life, from the life of you know, siblings and children and so forth. Right in with those details. This will be fun to get into in a future listener mail installment.
Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcasts, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
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