Pretend Play, Part 2: Theory of Mind and Imaginary Friends
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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 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. Rob, 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

loves engaging in pretend play with you know her various uh dinosaurs kind of doing imaginary tasks and going to imaginary events and things like that uh but also uh 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 in on their imaginative play. And, you know, 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 doesn't stick. Yeah, it's like falling back into a dream. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That was looking at the state of research on pretend play in children. That paper was by a researcher named Dina Skolnick-Weisberg, published in 2015. 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 instincts.

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 other people different things are happening in their minds but

We are not 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 this is, of course, a topic that's come up on the show multiple times before, but it'll keep coming up because it's a huge part of the human condition. And it's so fascinating to think about. It's one of those things that we use all the time to the point that we think of it as just reality. We think of what we know of others' mental states and what we attribute to other people's mental states as being just how...

how people are. You know, we think we know them. But in reality, like, whether we're dealing with

the closest relationships in your life, you know, significant others, 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 create a simulation of their mind state, of what their, you know, roughly their goals, their attitudes towards us generally are. And

And then we react to those models. And so it is kind of interesting, kind of haunting to think about the fact that the you that I think I know best is actually inside of me. And of course, theory of mind can be trained on plenty of non-human entities as well, on objects and on real things. So it's a very powerful part of the human cognition tool chest.

That's right. It's, 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 Machiavellianism. It's, it's everywhere. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's involved in all of our prejudices. It's involved, you know, in our hatred as well as our love. So it's, you know, 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 theropod 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 nom-nom sounds when the crayon reaches the dinosaur's mouth.

And about this connection, Weisberg writes in the paper, quote, "...pretence 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 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. Mm hmm.

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, really? And 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 you are. Absolutely.

Oh, but to talk about killing the joke by over explaining it. Nevertheless, I'm going to go there. I would love to understand better the like the minute mechanics of that kind of humor. Like how close is.

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 the whole slipping on the peel clown shenanigan thing.

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 one calling, but it 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, OK, to come back to playing pretend and theory of mind, the connections we've talked about suggest 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 to do.

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 Ann false belief task. Or sometimes in the literature, they just call this a false belief test. Here's a simplified version of it. OK, 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 to. 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. Right.

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 state, 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.

But 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 cite 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 Dorr and Angeline Lillard, published in Imagination, Cognition, and Personality in 2015, 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 were any correlations. One was a child's tendency to engage in fantasy ideation and activities. So this would be related to pretending. It was 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. Yeah.

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 that are 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. Like, 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 ball 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. 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 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. ♪

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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, right?

But a different related question is, what about simulating the workings of an external mind that is at its base level 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 like the ultimate pretend play manifestation, an imaginary being that is altogether imaginary and invisible, but also but is also gifted with varying degrees of agency and intelligence.

This, of course, gets more complicated when you try and 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 you 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 start 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 like entity who is her consistent imaginary friend, but she does seem to ascribe a lot of personality to various pretend entities like giving 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 sort of comes out of the research I've been 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 attached 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 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

an invisible friend, despite the fact that I was the eldest child. And in many respects, the eldest child seemed to be more likely to have an imaginary friend. My own child had bee and wasp friends that I remember. And so I asked them about this. I was like, do you remember your bee and wasp friends? And they were like, no, I don't remember the bee and wasp friends at all. I remember three imaginary cats that

that I had at one point. And 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 whole 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, 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, my, my child's being lost friends. I don't think they really talked or anything. They just, they were essentially animals that were invisible. Um, 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, I was like me and my siblings, none of us had invisible friends that, you know, I've right. And she's like, no, but she shared that she had seven imaginary friends when she was a child. Um,

And she was the eldest child. This would have been the, I guess, the early 50s. So that'll be worth keeping in mind as we proceed through the discussion here. So one of the sources I was looking at for this, this was a 2018 meta-analysis, Prevalence of Imaginary Companions in Children, a meta-analysis by Moriguchi and Toto. This was in the Merrill Palmer Quarterly. And the

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 discuss imaginary friends and personified objects as both being forms of imaginary companions, but stress that a key difference one tends to find is that the relationship between child and personified object tends to be more of a matter of like, these are my pets or these are my children. 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 your equal. It's not someone you boss around or care for. I want to add that in too because I don't want to...

I don't want to create this idea that, you know, bossy kids just have 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, 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'll also note that some researchers consider personified objects to be imaginary friends, but not always. Again, we have to remind ourselves that 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. ♪

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Now, they briefly touch on the history of imaginary friends with the study of them first popping up in 1895 with the work of Clara Wostrowski, 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 1918, and it wasn't until the 1960s 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 1960s, imaginary friends were were to be feared or anything, but just, you know, broad strokes.

now one question you might have it's like okay well what what does this mean does this mean that nobody had imaginary friends before the 20th century um well that is actually one 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 um and it's only as we get into the 20th century that it's being noticed and so forth i think

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, Clausen and Pasmano point out in 2007's Pretend Companions, I've seen this cited in numerous studies as well, that the idea of childhood as we understand it today perhaps didn't really emerge until like the 17th 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 17th 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 or talking to spirits and so forth. Yeah, the goat whispered something to me. Yeah.

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 playtime and time alone are perhaps both key requirements for their emergence of an invisible companion in 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 get to know your imaginary friend, in which you would be able to generate this idea and play with it?

They cite works from 2003 and 1979 that report they reported a very low rate of reported invisible friends in India, 0.2 percent in one study, which is really low compared to some of the Western stats that I'll mention here in a bit.

And, uh, they attributed it to limited play time 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, um,

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.

Hmm. Now, one of the sources they cite here on this is the work of Lloyd DeMoss from 1974, 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 DeMoss here, who lived 1931 through 2020. 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

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 more strongly in recent times in certain cultures. Yeah, yeah. So I feel that we have like a few different ways to potentially think about it. It's something that was long invisible to adults, had at least less space to foster in 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 20th 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 you you are engaging with this mental model of their mind. You know, what are you really speaking to? You're speaking to this imaginary construct. That person no longer exists in a physical world.

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 in in the same category with the imaginary friend usually. Mm hmm.

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, emotional, and cognitive development.

Just a few of the possible attributed benefits in the meta-analysis include children with ICs or imaginary companions may have more developed socio-cognitive and narrative skills.

Children with ICs 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

Yeah.

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 2014 study from Gleason and Calpito that they point out that found that children with egalitarian child IC relationships chose more constructive coping strategies than did those with these child IC relationships that are more like, you know, pet or, you know, child, you know, care relationship. So, yeah, 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 pretty much all of our scholarship on ICs

has come out of Western culture, where there's generally a majority of children with ICs of one sort or another. And so you have to ask, and again, this is a problem in other studies as well, obviously, scientific and otherwise, like what's your sample consist of? Is it a bunch of 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,

Uh, apparently due to cultural reasons, though, the rate was still something like 50%. So, um, it's, so it's just, that's compared to 60 to 65% rate in studies of Western children. So, you know, uh, it's a sizable difference, but you're still looking at, at 50%. Um,

Obviously, there's a great deal to unravel there. In their meta-analysis, they further elaborate that 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 parental concern, despite, to be clear, a strong support for pretend play in general in said culture. So,

So, yeah, it gets complex trying to tease apart, like, well, how much of it is a cultural factor? How much of it is just parents paying attention and so forth? So they summarize, quote, imaginative and pretend play may be universal behaviors across cultures with an evolutionary origin, but how the play is constructed and 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 age.

imaginary companions. And I think that's interesting to think of as well. 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 of

And parents who disapprove of imaginary friends, either in general or specifics, like I don't trust Mr. Bongo or whatever, they may retain even less of the details. However, while the children themselves may be the best source, there 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 were 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, 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, and,

And they will create angels and demons for you at the drop of a hat. So many studies, therefore, focus on both children and parents and then compare the notes. Also key, sex and birth order. On the birth order side of things, firstborns and presumably singletons are most likely to have imaginary friends, something like 2.8 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. ♪

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Now, I want to get into a more specific question that came up for me on this topic. And it was it came up because it's the title of a paper I ran across from 2012 published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion by J. Bradley Weiger, Katrina Paxson and Lacey Ryan. What do invisible friends know? And this, of course, leans heavily into questions of theory of mind.

Yeah, it all comes back. In this study, the authors question 36 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 with dog at one end and God at the other and humanity 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 1988 film My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki.

In this, if you haven't seen it, two young girls in the Japanese countryside encounter friendly nature spirits in the form of Totoros, as well as a cat bus. And it does not expressly deal with them as imaginary friends, but if we were to think of the Totoros 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're 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, Gigi, in Kiki's Delivery Service, who is a cat who speaks with a human voice.

The Totoro seem to have their own category, much like what we're discussing here. When you were talking about the invisible companions, 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?

No, we'll discuss between human and God. So I wasn't able to get a hold of the full study, but the lead author, J. Bradley Weiger, 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 study's experiments, the children, who all came from various Christian denominations, so they had this, to varying degrees, some idea of what God is within that cultural belief system. And then 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. Something like 63% 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. 53% said that their best friend,

this is like a real person, would know what the picture was as well. So that's less. So 63% for them, 53% for their friends, 44% said a dog would know, and 90% said that God would know.

And the imaginary friend, 67%. 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 10% 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 folder. So that's, yeah. But, 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, that's fascinating. Privileged knowledge, not omniscience, but a heightened niscience. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, once the picture was revealed, it turned out to be an elephant on a ball. Oh, I 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 the dog would also surely fail to guess what it was. Right.

And in the book, Wagner comments on this and kind of waxes 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 he 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 to I feel like to to to really learn much, at least in certain areas of their life.

Um, but like that is what childhood is. It's constantly being, uh, finding out that, oh, I, 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, 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 home here for the authors was that imaginary friends or invisible friends were in between entities, that they were they 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 an all-seeing God is very much a concept. 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. 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 yeah, to your point, I feel like we don't even necessarily need to invoke superstition.

like ideas of a Christian God and all of this. You consider such notions as the evil eye, which in some traditions is held to be this malevolent force that will hear you if you boast of your blessings too loudly, that will seek you out and curse you. Invisible, its powers of detection seem rather boundless, such that you choose your words carefully in every instance. And there are similar concepts as well. Santa Claus, though not invisible,

And does kind of take on this sort of invisible status outside of Christmas Eve itself. Right. And we'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 counterexample to these beings like, you know, angels and ghosts and gods that have sort of vague, indefinite powers. You can wonder what the boundaries of their power are, and you're not really sure. Uh,

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 and then i think in the better examples of of your your x-men you know their special power is also to their detriment it's also their great flaw uh so yeah it's fascinating to think about but but yeah this idea of invisibility uh and or disembodiedness having the uh

the effect of 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 in the human psyche to like lean into these ideas of the unseen world and

And so, yeah, it makes you wonder. It's like 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, you know, any of these other examples we mentioned earlier that are prevalent in children.

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 are also probably some strong connections to, you know, 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, it's

we cannot help but attribute a mind to it. We cannot help simulate it. Even if we know on other levels that it's based entirely on what we're inputting and 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. This is really not related to our topic today, but 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 chatbot, even when I feel my primary emotion for it is distrust and even antipathy.

You know, I got into that topic a little bit in November in an interview that I did here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind with Jonathan Birch, The Edge of Sentience. You know, I asked him about this because this is something that discussed a bit in his book, you know, like, what does it mean when I feel like I need to be polite?

to the AI, to the chatbot or whatever, or even like 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 general wisdom here is, yes, you should be nice to them for a variety of reasons.

If for no other reason, like, do you really need one other thing in your life to be kind of like rude to and yell at? No, there's probably a better channel for that energy. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I guess now that I think about it, I probably do have an opinion on that, which is that we, 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.

Yeah, the one interesting difference, but the more that I think about it, the less of a difference it is and the more of a similarity it is. If you were 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, and this is something that Jonathan Birch 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 100% 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, you know, 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 A.I. 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. It helps you be mean to people later. Yeah. And for me, 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 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, uh, yeah, from your life, from the life of siblings and children and so forth. Yeah. Right in with those details. This will be fun to get into in a future list or mail installment. Uh,

Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast 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. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.