The development of an understanding of modesty

By R. Banerjee. 2000

96 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous research has shown that children's understanding of how others evaluate them improves during primary school. Modesty reflects a complex form of this understanding, since one must appreciate that a self-deprecating presentation of the self can lead to enhanced social evaluation. The present research examines the understanding of modesty in children aged between 6 and 10 years. In Expt 1, 179 children were asked to choose between modest and immodest responses to praise in hypothetical situations, and then to justify their choices. Children from age 8 onwards nor only showed a preference for the modest responses but also justified this preference in terms of the negative impact of immodesty on social evaluation. In Expt 2, 60 children judged modest and immodest responses, and also completed two social cognition tasks capping second-order mental-state reasoning. A teacher-assessed measure of self-monitoring was also administered. As in the first experiment, children from age 8 viewed modest responses more positively than immodest responses. Furthermore, attitudes towards modesty were associated with individual differences in self-monitoring and social cognition,such that children with greater sensitivity to the interpersonal dynamics of social situations were more likely than others to rate modest responses positively. Implications for understanding children's social behaviour are discussed.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/affc27e02ff18d000a05474619cfe3441823a3fd

How researchers see this paper

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In Social Psychology

1. V. Slaughter
2. C. Fernández
3. Mark Nielsen
4. A. Shahaeian
5. C. Peterson
6. L. Henderson
7. Anna R. McAlister

In Sociology and Political Science

1. C. Fernández
2. L. Henderson
3. Mark Nielsen
4. C. Peterson
5. A. Shahaeian
6. V. Slaughter

Citations in the corpus

• Taiwan and Mainland Chinese and Canadian children's categorization and evaluation of lie- and truth-telling: A modesty effect (2001, background): “Recent research by Banerjee (2000) suggests that the age difference regarding the moral values of modesty may not be because of acculturation alone.”
• Social-Cognitive Factors in Childhood Social Anxiety: A Preliminary Investigation. (2001, methodology): “Using a more simple response format and more concrete descriptions of affective states, our Shyness Negative Affect Scale (Henderson, Banerjee, & Smith, 1999; see Appendix) asked children to rate how often they experienced a variety of negative affective states related to social anxiety. Children we”
• Cultural and Family Influences on Children’s Theory of Mind Development (2014, methodology): “This work built on previous studies of school-age children (Banerjee, 2000; Filippova & Astington, 2008), finding that only approximately half of a group of 10- to 11-year-old children passed a Sarcasm task.”
• Mindful storytellers: Emerging pragmatics and theory of mind development (2013, methodology): “Three vignettes that require the child to infer a character’s belief about another character’s belief were included: the Birthday Story (Sullivan et al., 1994), the Messy Room Story (Sullivan, Winner, & Hopfield, 1995) and the Faux Pas Story (Banerjee, 2000).”