Peer Relations and the Understanding of Faux Pas:Longitudinal Evidence
for Bidirectional Associations
Robin Banerjee
University of Sussex
Dawn Watling
Royal Holloway,University of London
Marcella Caputi
University of Pavia
Research connecting children’s understanding of mental states to their peer relations at school remains scarce.Previous work by the authors demonstrated that children’s understanding of mental states in the context of a faux pas—a social blunder involving unintentional insult—is associated with concurrent peer rejection.The present report describes a longitudinal follow-up investigation of 210child
ren from the original sample,aged 5–6or 8–9years at Time 1.The results support a bidirectional model suggesting that peer rejection may impair the acquisition of faux pas understanding,and also that,among older children,difficulties in under-standing faux pas predict increased peer rejection.These findings highlight the important and complex associ-ations between social understanding and peer relations during childhood.
Children’s social understanding has been a major focus of developmental psychology research over the last 25years.Work on this topic has revealed reliable developmental progressions in children’s understanding of mental states,such as beliefs,emotions,intentions,and desires,which are clearly pertinent to human social behavior (e.g.,Flavell,2004;Hughes &Leekam,2004).Moreover,there is dramatic evidence of individual differences in this kind of ‘‘theory-of-mind’’(ToM)understanding.Research with individuals on the autistic spectrum has suggested that significant social impairments can be linked to difficulties in reasoning about
mental states (e.g.,Baron-Cohen,1995;Happe
´,1994,1995).Such evidence supports the intuitively appealing notion that individual differences in social understanding are connected with children’s social interactions and relationships.
Many research studies have also shown that there are individual differences in social under-standing within typically developing samples.Existing theoretical and empirical work gives us reason to expect close connections between these individual differences on the one hand and varia-tions in children’s social interactions and relation-ships on the other (e.g.,Dunn,1995;Repacholi &Slaughter,2003).However,our knowledge of the social antecedents and consequences of children’s social understanding is far from complete.Perhaps most neglected of all is the relevance of school-aged children’s social understanding to their interactions and relationships with their peers.Given the recog-nized importance of peer relations at school in chil-dren’s development (e.g.,Ladd,1999;Rubin,Bukowski,&Parker,2006),investigations of this issue are sorely needed.The present study exam-ines longitudinal connections between children’s performance on an age-appropriate measure of social understanding—the faux pas task—and their levels of peer acceptance and rejection at school.Social Understanding and Social Relationships
Carpendale and Lewis (2004)have proposed a theoretical formulation of children’s social
We would like to extend our thanks and appreciation to the children and staff at the schools who participated in this study,and to Beatrice Birtell,Nathalie Elsaesser,Dimitra Fotopoulou,Sophy Griffin-Beale,Laura Kerr,Tara Sims,Rachel Stock,Ashley Thomas,Sarah Watson,and Alexandra Yates for the
ir contribu-tion to data collection.This research was funded by Brighton &Hove City Council.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robin Banerjee,School of Psychology,University of Sussex,Falmer,Brighton BN19QH,UK.Electronic mail may be sent to robinb@sussex.ac.uk.
Child Development,November/December 2011,Volume 82,Number 6,Pages 1887–1905
Ó2011The Authors
Child Development Ó2011Society for Research in Child Development,Inc.All rights reserved.0009-3920/2011/8206-0014DOI:
10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01669.x
understanding that explicitly emphasizes the con-struction of social understanding within the context of social interaction.Not surprisingly,most of the extant empirical evidence indicating such social cons
truction has concerned family processes.These include common forms of triadic interaction experi-enced during ,social referencing,gaze following,pointing),but the presence and quality of enduring social relationships is also likely to be important.For example,some research identifies having older siblings as conferring an advantage to children on false belief ,Ruffman,Perner, Naito,Parkin,&Clements,1998),and numerous longitudinal studies have pointed to aspects of the parent–child relationship as influencing children’s understanding of mental states.These studies high-light the importance of broad variables such as parental warmth,sensitivity,attachment,and ,Meins et al.,2002;Pears&Moses, 2003),as well as specific features of family interactions such as references to mental states in ,Adria´n,Clemente,&Villanu-eva,2007;Dunn,Brown,&Beardsall,1991;Ensor& Hughes,2008;Peterson&Slaughter,2003;Ruffman, Slade,&Crowe,2002).
Adding to this literature is a body of work inves-tigating the reverse causal connection,namely,the impact of social understanding on children’s social interactions.In contrast with the many analyses of autism that attribute significant relational and behavioral impairments to inadequacies in social understanding,the evidence for the‘‘real-life’’manifestations of individual differences in typically developing children’s social understanding is less than overwhelming.Hughes and Leekam’s(2004) r
peereview provides many sound reasons for expecting ToM to predict social relations,but the number of empirical studies that have actually linked individ-ual differences in ToM to variations in social rela-tions is fairly small.Some studies have shown that children who are relatively advanced on ToM tasks display more elaborate pretend ,Hughes &Dunn,1997;Taylor&Carlson,1997)and also exhibit greater social competence—such as more cooperation and less conflict—than children with lower ToM ,Bosacki&Astington, 1999;Cassidy,Werner,Rourke,Zubernis,&Balar-aman,2003;Lalonde&Chandler,1995;Watson, Nixon,Wilson,&Capage,1999).However,the con-nection between ToM performance and social inter-actions is not always ,Badenes,Estevan, &Bacete,2000).The lack of a solid research base demonstrating the social advantages conferred by strengths in social understanding is somewhat surprising,insofar as the notion of‘‘social compe-tence’’is widely assumed to encompass good social ,Rose-Krasnor,1997).
Social Understanding in the Peer Context
We believe that children’s interactions with other children,outside the family context,are a key con-text for the construction and manifestation of social understanding.Unfortunately,this issue has not been addressed adequately.Part of the problem is that research on social-cognitive development has largely focused on the period up to5years of age, during which the family may be assumed to be the
dominant socializing context.On the other hand,it is noteworthy that some of the most commonly cited developments in social understanding—such as false belief understanding—occur between3and 5years of ,Wellman,Cross,&Watson, 2001),a time when peer interaction increases dra-matically for many children in Western cultures. Moreover,the peer context in early,middle,and late childhood has long been recognized by devel-opmental theorists as providing important opportu-nities not only for learning sociobehavioral skills such as sharing and turn taking but also for making advances in empathy and perspective , Eisenberg,Fabes,&Spinrad,2006).Indeed,in response to Carpendale and Lewis’s(2004)article on the social construction of social understanding, both Banerjee(2004)and Zerwas,Balaraman,and Brownell(2004)argued that peer interactions pro-vide an important context for the development of children’s social understanding.Yet,despite evi-dence showing that children vary dramatically in the quantity and quality of peer interactions they experience(Gifford-Smith&Brownell,2003), empirical evidence linking features of peer relations to variations in social understanding remains scarce.
Some important observational studies have shown us that children’s interactions with their friends do appear to provide valuable opportunities for learning about the mind.Children talk about mental states in their peer play,as well as in con-versations with families,and the peer context often involves
highly relevant experiences such as pre-tend ,Howes&Matheson,1992;Lillard, 1993;Youngblade&Dunn,1995).In line with this, some longitudinal studies have shown that children’s belief and emotion understanding can be predicted by features of earlier friendship ,Faulkner&Miell,1993;Maguire& Dunn,1997).Moreover,as noted above,other
1888Banerjee,Watling,and Caputi
authors have suggested that individual differences in social understanding have consequences for the qualities of children’s conversations and play inter-actions with ,Cassidy et al.,2003;Cutting &Dunn,2006;Hughes,Lecce,&Wilson,2007; Lalonde&Chandler,1995;Slomkowski&Dunn, 1996;Walker,2005;Watson et al.,1999).Although some evidence has suggested that advanced social-cognitive capabilities may sometimes be evident in children displaying negative behavior such as bullying(Renouf et al.,2010;Sutton,Smith,& Swettenham,1999),most of the work in this area has pointed to the associations of better social understanding with more positive interpersonal relationships and interactions.
Notwithstanding the value of the studies dis-cussed above,we have relatively little insight into how commonly observed variations in peer rela-tions are associated over time with children’s understandi
ng of the social and psychological world they inhabit.Perhaps the most commonly studied indexes of a school-aged child’s peer rela-tions concern the extent to which he or she is liked or disliked by the peer group.Long-standing socio-metric techniques,commonly involving three posi-tive and three negative peer nominations made by each child in a class,are widely used in the peer relations literature to uncover these levels of‘‘peer acceptance’’and‘‘peer rejection’’(often put together in order to classify children into peer status categories,such as popular or rejected)and an extensive literature is devoted to understanding the antecedents and consequences of these markers of children’s peer ,Rubin et al.,2006). The use of sociometric techniques to elucidate dif-ferences in the interpersonal functioning of children at school has beenfirmly established over many decades and has the advantage of drawing on mul-tiple informants(multiple peers)with privileged access to interactions with each other across multi-ple formal and informal settings(see Pepler& Craig,1998).Moreover,reviews of studies utilizing sociometric nominations have shown that these data map closely onto qualities of peer interaction and self-reported socioemotional , Gifford-Smith&Brownell,2003;Newcomb,Bukow-ski,&Pattee,1993).
Despite the extensive body of work on the corre-lates of sociometric acceptance and rejection,only a small number of studies have considered links with children’s performance on social understanding t
asks.One study of4-to6-year-olds(Slaughter, Dennis,&Pritchard,2002)provided some indica-tions that individual differences in mindreading abilities may be related to levels of peer acceptance, although this was apparently only the case among children older than5years of age.Another study of3-to5-year-olds(Peterson&Siegal,2002)found that children who were rejected by their peers lagged behind their more popular counterparts on ToM tasks.In contrast,another study(Badenes et al.,2000)showed no clear link between peer rejection and mentalizing abilities among4-to 6-year-olds at all.Thus,the few extant studies on this topic do not lend themselves to a coherent portrayal of the connection between social under-standing and peer relations,and none provides longitudinal evidence to suggest likely develop-mental pathways.
The Faux Pas Task
One of the difficulties in establishing connections between social understanding and peer relations may be that standard ToM tasks do not adequately capture the forms of mental-state reasoning that are most pertinent to real-life social interactions and relationships.This is especially so when we move beyond the ages of5or6;undoubtedly,there are substantial variations in pupils’social behavior in middle childhood,but these clearly cannot be mapped onto performance on ToM tasks that most children pass by6years.However,there is some tentative evidence that more‘‘naturalistic’’mea-sures
of mental-state reasoning,tapping the under-standing of links between multiple mental states (e.g.,intentions,emotions,beliefs)in everyday social situations,may have some connection with school-aged pupils’interpersonal relations.Specifi-cally,one recent study has shown that peer rejec-tion in school-aged children is associated with performance on the faux pas measure of social understanding(Banerjee&Watling,2005).
The faux pas task wasfirst conceived in the con-text of work with high-functioning autistic individ-uals,a significant proportion of whom perform successfully on standard ToM tasks despite clearly showing distinctive sociobehavioral and relational ,Dahlgren&Trillingsgaard,1996). Baron-Cohen,O’Riordan,Stone,Jones,and Plaisted (1999)showed that such participants display diffi-culties in the ability to identify and explain‘‘faux pas’’situations where one character unintentionally insults another due to lack of knowledge about some key feature of the other ,mak-ing a derogatory comment about dinner ladies to another child whose mother—unbeknownst to the protagonist—is herself a dinner lady).Importantly,
Peer Relations Faux Pas1889
several recent studies with typically developing children have shown that performance on the faux pa
s task is associated with other complex forms of social reasoning(Banerjee,2000,2002),with teacher ratings of sociability(Banerjee&Hender-son,2001),and with peer rejection(Banerjee& Watling,2005).
These studies provide persuasive evidence that the faux pas task taps mental-state reasoning that is relevant to everyday peer interaction.In Banerjee and Watling’s(2005)adaptation of the faux pas task, children responded to a series of questions follow-ing each hypothetical story,showing whether or not they detected the faux pas,understood that one character has upset another,and recognized that this upset occurred as a result of an underinformed knowledge⁄belief state and was therefore not intended.Crucially,the authors found that8-to9-year-old children who received more negative socio-metric nominations from their classmates performed less well on the task.This association was not due to basic comprehension or tofirst-order understanding of the emotional impact of the faux pas but rather to the more complex recognition that the upset was not intentional and to the appreciation of the ignorance that led to the faux pas.No such association was found in a sample of5-to6-year-olds,most of whom performed poorly on the task.The report on that investigation also noted the distinctive impor-tance of the faux pas task in particular,since a ver-sion of Sullivan,Zaitchik,and Tager-Flusberg’s (1994)second-order false belief task was not signifi-cantly correlated with levels of social preference after controlling for the faux pas scores(whereas faux pas scores remained signific
antly correlated with social preference even after controlling for the second-order false belief performance;in our longi-tudinal follow-up study,we noted that the second-order false belief task was correlated with the faux pas task at each time point,even after controlling for receptive vocabulary(all partial r s>.29,p<.001). Therefore,we again evaluated the potential impor-tance of the second-order false belief task as an ante-cedent or consequence or differences in peer relations.However,there were no significant cross-lagged pathways between our measures of peer relations and scores on the second-order false belief task after controlling for receptive vocabulary(all partial|r|s<.13,p>.30).Therefore,we have excluded the second-order false belief task from the main analysis reported here).
These results raise the intriguing question of how distinctive the faux pas task is in capturing an aspect of social understanding that clearly relates to real-life peer experiences.Clearly,it stands out as a more demanding task than the standardfirst-order false belief task,which is typically passed by 4–5years of age(Wellman et al.,2001).Yet,as the evidence above implies,it also differs from other relatively demanding assessments of mental-state reasoning,such as second-order false belief tasks, insofar as it maps onto real-life differences in inter-personal relations in a more intimate way.In fact, this distinctive link between faux pas reasoning and peer relationships corresponds with early w
ork—predating research on ToM—that connected children’s skills in perspective taking with qualities of their social behavior and relationships.
In the late1960s and early1970s,researchers were already devising strategies for assessing and remediating difficulties in‘‘social role taking’’(e.g.,Chandler,1973;Chandler,Greenspan,& Barenboim,1974;Flavell,Botkin,Fry,Wright,& Jarvis,1968).These authors showed how,for example,sequences of cartoons could be used to reveal some children’s difficulties in‘‘discount [ing]their own understanding of the test situa-tions and adopt[ing]the roles of persons less well informed than themselves’’(Chandler et al.,1974, p.548).At around the same time,an elaborate stage model of increasing sophistication in role taking was developed by Selman(1976,1980), who went on to consider how differences in role taking are manifested in different‘‘interpersonal negotiation strategies’’(Selman,Beardslee,Schultz, Krupa,&Podorefsky,1986).The theoretical impli-cation of these early investigations was that a full and mature appreciation of others’perspectives leads to qualitatively different experiences of peer interaction,in comparison to a more‘‘egocentric’’perspective;indeed,Vernberg,Ewell,Beery,and Abwender(1994)have shown that12-to14-year-old pupils with more sophisticated negotiation strategies tend to develop greater intimacy and companionship when establishing new friend-ships.
The precise details of social understanding impli-cated in a child’s perspective-taking performance often remained opaque in this work,but one important feature of the early conceptualizations of developments in perspective taking was that chil-dren were not assumed to undergo a seismic shift from no understanding to full understanding of others’perspectives.Unfortunately,in the years that followed,children’s gradually increasing sophistication in understanding others’mental states was to a large extent overshadowed by the focus on a single transition in recognizing the rep-
1890Banerjee,Watling,and Caputi
resentational nature of belief states as measured by the false belief task(Chandler,2001).Now,how-ever,we can return to the notion of a complex and multifaceted model of social understanding,emerg-ing within the context of children’s interactions with social partners in order to understand why the faux pas task may serve as an important correlate of real-life peer relations.
Even in Chandler and colleagues’cartoon task, skillful perspective taking required far more than an appreciation of false belief.In fact,LeMare and Rubin(1987),in the course of demonstrating that performance on the cartoon task was linked with qualities of peer interaction,noted that successful role taking in this cartoon task required,among other components,not only a recognition of how certai
n antecedent situations could bring about a character’s emotional state but also how another character without information about those anteced-ent situations could form inaccurate cognitive rep-resentations and interpretations of thefirst character’s emotional behavior.We believe that this linkage of situational events,emotional states,and cognitive representations(influenced by access to information)maps closely onto the kinds of social insights needed for understanding a faux pas.The appreciation of this interplay between cognitive and emotional states is not tapped by standard first-or second-order ToM tasks(which typically address only beliefs about the physical identity or location of inanimate objects).The faux pas task may also differ in this respect from other measures of relatively‘‘advanced’’social understanding that still concentrate mainly on cognitive representa-tions of one’s own or another person’s belief states (e.g.,double-bluff,interpretive diversity,etc.; Carpendale&Chandler,1996;Happe´,1993).
The Present Study
Building on our hypothesis that the faux pas task offers a distinctively powerful tool for capturing the social understanding involved in everyday peer interactions,the present study reports on a24-month longitudinal follow-up of children from Banerjee and Watling’s(2005)study.Tracking the children’s faux pas understanding and sociometric scores over time provides a valuable opportunity to evaluate likel
y sequential pathways from faux pas understanding to peer relations,and from peer relations to faux pas understanding.We believe that both pathways are likely,in line with Hughes and Leekam’s(2004)argument that social relations may both transform and be transformed by chil-dren’s ToM.Our analysis should help to address several key predictions that could not be tested in the original study.First,we can evaluate whether peer rejection is likely to hinder children’s acquisi-tion of advanced mental-state reasoning skills. Banerjee and Watling indicated that the presence of highly negative social relations,rather than the absence of highly positive social relations,might be especially predictive of difficulties in learning about faux pas situations.We expect that this would be especially true over periods when children typically make the most progress in the faux pas task (between7and9years for girls and between9and 11years for boys,in Baron-Cohen et al.,1999; between6and8years,in Banerjee,2000),since active rejection and social exclusion will reduce opportunities to learn from peer interactions.
Second,we can evaluate the extent to which faux pas scores relate to subsequent peer relations.We expect that difficulties in faux pas early , around5–6years)are unlikely to be related to peer rejection since such difficulties would be normative for children at that age,but it is unclear whether better faux pas understanding may over time lead to increased peer acceptance.However,if the faux
pas task does indeed capture the kind of social understanding that is involved in everyday peer interaction,we can justifiably predict that when most children have typically made progress in understanding faux pas,those who stand out with relatively poor performance will be more likely to experience growing peer rejection.Following on from the pattern noted by Banerjee and Watling (2005),we expect that these negative sequelae of faux pas understanding will primarily reflect the consequences of difficulties in the more complex and subtle aspects of social reasoning in this task, specifically,a relatively poorer understanding of the ignorance and lack of intention on the part of the protagonist making the faux pas.The present study offers thefirst opportunity to test such hypotheses about longitudinal associations between social understanding and peer relations in school-aged children.
Method
Participants
The present study concerns data from210chil-dren,in two age groups,who were part of the sam-ple described by Banerjee and Watling(2005).At the first time point of data collection,the younger group consisted of31boys and41girls aged approxi-
Peer Relations Faux Pas1891
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