How Children Come to Care About Reputation: The tendency to assume that others could evaluate one’s behavior and the default preference to elicit positive instead of negative evaluations

Evaluative Audience Perception (EAP): How Children Come to Care About Reputation. Sara Valencia Botto, Philippe Rochat. Child Development Perspectives, July 7 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12335

Abstract: Despite the fact that reputational concerns are central to human psychology, we know little about when and how children come to care about the evaluation of others. In this article, we review recent studies on reputational concerns in early childhood, and propose that evaluative audience perception (EAP) is necessary to understand the developmental origins of reputation. Specifically, we argue that EAP’s two defining components—the tendency to assume that others could evaluate one’s behavior and the default preference to elicit positive instead of negative evaluations—lay the foundation for the development of reputational concerns. We provide evidence suggesting that EAP would emerge by 24 months and conclude by suggesting possible developmental models of EAP.