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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

What about kids that fake having an imaginary friend because they heard about imaginary friends?

Some people believe that creating imaginary friends is a deliberate process, and can be done by anyone who comes across the idea:

"You’ll create a tulpa by imagining a person in your head, and treating them as a person. The exact mechanism is unknown, but as you give a tulpa attention, and believe it can be a sentient person, it will grow into one, and act independently of you." https://www.tulpa.info/what-is-a-tulpa/

And some people believe that making a tulpa is just intentionally giving yourself a mental disorder.

I view it as running a child process inside of your brain. Tried it, didn't work. Might be related to my almost complete inability to vividly visualize things in my head while awake.

Yes and this seems related to the degrees of aphantasia we may have, there was an interesting thread a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19618927

Thanks for that link! I missed that thread, and the topic is super-interesting to me.

Isn't it basically just like writing fiction in your head? The act of creating a separate being in your own mind with its own personality and desires is exactly what you need to create believable characters.

For that matter, you are at a significant advantage in many extremely lucrative professions (notably, politics, management, finance, media, UX design, and law) if you can create an accurate mental simulacrum of the people you interact with. This is basically what separates the people who control what others do vs. those who get controlled.

Many years ago, I played MUD's (text-based MMORPG's of sorts, for the uninitiated) with strict roleplaying and the characters I played were very much separate from me in that I played out their emotions, desires, strengths and weaknesses and in conversations with friends, the characters were no me, or even controlled by me, outside of general themes or play styles that we chose in advance. It was more that I reacted to circumstances how I felt the character would and, in the moment, it didn't feel like I made the decisions (of course, I obviously did). This felt very similar as when you hear an author talk about their characters as if they were real independent people.

This could be more common than having an imaginary friend, although the line between having an imaginary friend and pretending to have one is blurry.

I'm also wondering where this is coming from. So far I've heard this exclusively from American movies. In Germany this kind of thing does not exist at all and I haven't heard anything like in South-East-Asia where I live since 7 years either.

I'd argue that you're wrong, because you are drawing upon your personal experiences instead of scientific inquiry.

Here is a study showing the same behavior in Kenya, Malawi, Nepal and the Dominican Republic. I didn't fully read it, but there is argument that such things exist, even if they aren't as prevalent. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ijop.12423

I definitely remember thinking up an imaginary friend because I saw on TV or something that it was a thing kids did. It didn't last long.

Are there any such documented cases? I would think that level of cognitive indirection is beyond most 3-7 year-olds.

From this article on the Psychology Today website:

Taylor and her colleagues found that 77 percent of these children said “yes” when asked if they had a pretend friend, and 40 percent spontaneously remarked at some point during the interview that they were talking about a pretend friend. The children offered statements such as, “Her is a fake animal,” “I just made him up in my head,” and “He’s not in real life.” Only one child was adamant that her invisible friend was real.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/growing-friendships/...

I don't think that addresses what I was wondering about. That a child acknowledges that their made-up friend is in fact made-up does not mean they're faking the made-up friend.

Sorry - I misunderstood. Are you talking about kids who will claim to have made-up friends because of peer pressure? I've not heard of that sort of thing before, but I suppose it's possible - some people/kids will tie themselves into knots just to fit in with the other kids.

(Personal example: I deliberately lied about not understanding how to do long division just so I wouldn't look too clever in front of my peers - I kept up the pretence for several months.)

Perhaps it's simplest to refer to the comment I replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20565292

I remember as a young kid thinking that it would make me look cute and creative if I had an imaginary friend (because apparently that was a thing kids were supposed to do). I couldn't keep it up - it just didn't really make sense to me.

How would you go about documenting that? There are so many kids. Kids imitate facial expressions or sayings they heard from television. Why wouldn't they just make up a fake friend because they heard about it on TV or youtube

Because for a 3-7 year-old, I'm not sure how to differentiate between made up a fake friend and made up a friend.

edit: To directly answer your question: I don't know, and that's part of my point.

> I'm not sure how to differentiate between made up a fake friend and made up a friend

Audience. A fake imaginary friend is a prop. The child sees imaginary friends are desirable and performs as if they have one. If there is no audience, there is no imaginary friend.

A bona fide imaginary friend, on the other hand, should be more likely to be addressed when the child thinks they’re alone.

What's the significance of the fake friend in the first place?

It's the topic of our discussion.

Maybe every single one of my kids is exceptional but I think at least two, and maybe all three, would have been capable of imitating that behavior for effect (amusing adults, attempting to amuse themselves in a way they'd observed another kid being amused), with an understanding of exactly what they were imitating, by no later than age two. Without understanding exactly what was going on, they might have managed to simply mimic the behavior some months earlier than that.

I think you're underestimating the level of cognitive indirection that 5-7 year olds are capable of.

So, you are "pretending" to pretend? Is that differentiation really meaningful in practice?

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