Keep the cat in the bag: Children understand that telling a friend’s secret can harm the friendship.

Abstract

Secrets play a powerful role in human social relationships. Here, we examine the developmental trajectory of 3- to 10-year-old children’s (N = 630) expectations about (a) how relationships impact whether people will keep secrets, and (b) how relationships are impacted when a confidee keeps versus tells a confider’s secret. Sophisticated expectations about the role of secrets in relationship maintenance develop across childhood. In particular, school-age children (6- to 10-year-olds) expect friends to be more likely to keep each other’s secrets than nonfriends (Study 1), and expect that if a friend breaks this norm and shares his friend’s secret with a third-party, it will harm the friendship (Studies 2 and 3). These expectations were specific to inferences about secrets: school-age children did not expect that sharing (or keeping) a friend’s fact or surprise would impact the friendship strength (Studies 2 and 3). These findings did not hold for preschoolers (3- to 5-year-olds), who did not have clear expectations linking secret sharing to friendship strength. Taken together, our results indicate that by 6 years of age, children understand that social relationships can increase people’s obligations to keep each other’s secrets, and that failing to do so can harm the relationship.

It takes two (or more): The social nature of secrets

“…For example, children perceive keeping and sharing secrets as a powerful indicator of social relationships, including friendship and group membership. By age 5, children expect secrets to be shared with friends rather than nonfriends (Anagnostaki et al, 2013), expect friends to keep each other's secrets (Liberman, 2020), and are more likely BOX 1 Secrets can have consequences for third-parties Sometimes, people's secrets are not about themselves, but about a third-party. People may keep these secrets out of concern for the third-party or certain relational obligations.…”

“…In fact, children see secret-sharing as an even stronger cue to friendship than other types of sharing: after hearing that a character shares a secret with person A, and shares a cookie or a fact with person B, children rate the character as closer to person A (Liberman & Shaw, 2018). Furthermore, if children find out that one person shares another person's secret, they expect this behavior to have negative implications for their friendship (Liberman, 2020). Thus, by the early school years, children know that secrets play an important role in establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships.…”

Keeping friends in mind: Development of friendship concepts in early childhood

“…However, there is some preliminary evidence to suggest that children's behaviors with regards to friends may align with their friendship concepts. For instance, preschoolers act partially and prosocially towards friends over non-friends: three-year-olds choose to help friends more than non-friends (Englemann, Haux, & Herrmann, 2019), and 4-to 6-year-olds share more with friends (Moore, 2009), and trust their friends to keep promises and not spill secrets (Chin, 2014;Liberman 2020). More directly, Paulus and Moore (2014) found correspondence between 5-year-olds' individual sharing expectations and their sharing behavior.…”

“…their inferences about friendship change based on how personal secrets are kept and shared, but not based on how facts or surprises are shared (Liberman, 2020;Liberman & Shaw, 2018).…”

“…And, by age 6, children use patterns of secret sharing to determine which people are likely to be friends (Liberman & Shaw, 2018): they expect secret sharing to be a better indicator of friendship than other types of sharing, including sharing a cookie. Indeed, 6 year olds understand that intimate secrets are a particularly relevant type of social information: their inferences about friendship change based on how personal secrets are kept and shared, but not based on how facts or surprises are shared (Liberman, 2020; Liberman & Shaw, 2018).…”