What Do Invisible Friends Know? Imaginary Companions, God, and Theory of Mind

Abstract

Theory of mind (ToM) research has been carried out in relation to a variety of human and nonhuman agents such as parents, friends, God, Mayan forest spirits, and animals. The present study adds a new agent to the list—the imaginary/invisible friend. Three types of ToM tasks were administered to 36 children, ages 2 to 8, who had invisible friends at the time of the tasks: occluded picture, background knowledge, and surprising contents tasks. The knowledge attributed to imaginary companions was compared to the knowledge attributed to God, as well as to a human and to a dog. Results showed that younger children tended to attribute knowledge to all agents, including imaginary friends. Older children treated God differently from all other agents, but the invisible friend was also treated differently from the human and the dog. Implications regarding cognitive development and anthropomorphism are considered, as well as for the in-between character of invisible friends.

Notes

¹It is important to note that Jaynes's theory was not based upon research with children but upon linguistic-historical analyses of the Gods described in ancient texts and the resemblances to a child's IF.

² Taylor and Carlson (2000) did find some children naming “Jesus” as their imaginary friend.

³For a fuller description of the IFs the children described and discussion of previous research on the subject, see Wigger (2011).

⁴Notable, because the child was so young, one of those instances was from an older 2-year-old who said, on the occluded picture task, that one IF would know but the other would not.

⁵The oldest child said (surprisingly, compared to her other answers) that the dog would know rocks were in the crayon box, but then she immediately volunteered that the dog “would smell the nature.” We conservatively scored this as 0.

⁶When combined, those who scored 1s (n = 6) and 2s (n = 7) create a group comparable in size to the other two.