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

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the world of pretend play in childhood development and human consciousness.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
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

(00:37):
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

(00:57):
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,

(01:21):
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

(01:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
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.

(02:16):
Parents at least tend to give that five to ten
minute warning if they can.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, it's like falling back into a dream. Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
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.

(02:51):
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

(03:15):
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,

(03:39):
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

(04:01):
of mind skills, the ability to imagine and model the
mental states of other people is something that is acquired
and refined throughout childhood.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
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

(04:32):
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

(04:55):
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

(05:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
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

(06:28):
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,

(06:50):
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

(07:12):
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.

(07:35):
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,

(07:56):
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

(08:17):
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

(08:38):
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

(09:01):
to treat the crayons as something other than what they
actually are.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
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

(09:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
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

(10:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
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

(10:52):
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

(11:15):
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

(11:38):
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

(12:00):
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

(12:21):
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

(12:42):
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

(13:06):
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

(13:26):
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

(13:48):
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

(14:10):
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

(14:32):
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

(14:54):
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

(15:16):
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

(15:37):
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

(15:57):
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

(16:20):
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

(16:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
It is.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
I remember reading about this several years back. I believe yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
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,

(17:41):
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

(18:04):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
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

(19:30):
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

(19:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
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

(20:33):
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

(20:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
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.

(21:25):
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

(21:49):
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

(22:09):
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

(22:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
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

(23:23):
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.

(23:45):
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

(24:08):
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.

(24:33):
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

(24:53):
the imaginary friend it is more egalitarian in its nature.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
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

(25:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
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

(25:49):
that is emerging, often unlanguaged from the minds of children.
So you know, bear that in mind as we move forward.

(26:12):
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

(26:34):
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

(26:55):
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,

(27:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
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

(28:12):
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

(28:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
Yeah, the goat whispered something to me, help.

Speaker 1 (28:52):
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

(29:13):
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

(29:35):
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

(29:57):
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

(30:23):
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

(30:46):
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

(31:06):
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

(31:27):
relatively new.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
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

(31:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
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

(32:29):
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.

(32:51):
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,

(33:14):
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,

(33:38):
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,

(33:58):
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

(34:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
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

(34:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
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

(35:30):
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

(35:52):
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,

(36:13):
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

(36:34):
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

(36:57):
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

(37:19):
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,

(37:42):
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,

(38:02):
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

(38:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
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

(39:07):
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,

(39:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
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,

(40:10):
and these are my friends from down the street and
so forth.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
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

(40:36):
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

(40:57):
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,

(41:21):
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

(41:43):
of course leans heavily into questions of theory of mind. Ah.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
Yeah, it all comes back.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
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

(42:11):
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

(42:31):
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

(42:52):
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

(43:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
Nos, well, we'll discuss between human and God.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
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

(44:12):
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

(44:34):
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.

(44:55):
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

(45:17):
would know, and the imaginary friend sixty seven percent. So
imaginary friends were quote slightly more likely to know than
everyone except God.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Privileged and knowledge, not omnisciens, but heightened missions.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
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.

(46:32):
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

(46:54):
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

(47:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:38):
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

(47:58):
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

(48:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
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

(49:01):
of physics, and thus can see beyond walls and has
access to information that we can't access.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
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

(49:29):
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,

(49:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
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

(50:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
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

(51:12):
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,

(51:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
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.

(52:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
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

(53:32):
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

(53:54):
like no, there's probably a better channel for that energy.

Speaker 2 (53:58):
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

(54:19):
way in other similar situations where people would be harmed.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
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.

(54:45):
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

(55:06):
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

(55:28):
and what have you.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Yeah, and for me anyway, I think that's the bigger
take home.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
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.

(56:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ 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 stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(56:59):
product of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your
favorite shows.