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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2586 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 23, 2023

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Fun article I found: East Asians rarely have imaginary friends as children, whereas Westerners have imaginary friends at a prevalence of 50%. On the other hand, East Asians are more likely to personify inanimate objects. The authors say that this is for cultural reasons, but i’m actually leaning toward deep genetic differences in tendency — Western religion, poetry, and music are much more likely to extol brotherly affection than those of East Asia, which (imo) favors an emphasis on place, natural objects, and strict hierarchy.

Is it just me or does 50% sound outrageously high? I never had an imaginary friend, and have never met anyone who had an imaginary friend (if it matters, I'm a white Californian who grew up in the 90s). I and a few kids I knew went through the motions of "creating" one because TV and childrens books were so adamant that they were normal that we felt weird not having one, but I can't recall a single instance where a child I was interacting with seemed to genuinely believe in an imaginary friend. Am I being too restrictive in my definition of "had an imaginary friend?" Or was I just an unusually uncreative child surrounded by other unusually uncreative children?

I forced myself to pretend I had an imaginary friend because I thought everyone else did. It was always a lame and worthless concept IMO.

I remember seeing mentions of it in literature and such and I always thought it was just kids playing pretend.

Then I read about a paper that claimed when kids with such were stuck in a NMR reported talking to their imaginary friends, it looks like they're having auditory hallucinations.

Which surprised me.

I had several imaginary friends when I was little, but I never thought of that as being an unusual position. I'm not sure how much media I was consuming when I was 3-4, but I certainly wasn't talking to people about what society thought was normal for me at that age.

I had an imaginary friend as a kid, but don't really talk about it after the age of maybe 12.

I have also only ever encountered the concept of an imaginary friend in fiction and would have been weirded out as a kid if I ever met someone who truly believed they had one. Perhaps it was a brief fad in the mid-20th century that happened to coincide with a greater interest in child psychology research at that time.

I'd guess it is more that changes in the way children were raised eliminated the need for it, or something along those lines rather than it being a "fad". Two people who were kids in the 90s say they didn't. I was a kid in the late 70s/early 80s and had one. I'm not sure the ages of the other people who had or didn't have one but it could point to a generational difference.

Late 70s early 80s for me too!

Yeah, I'm confused about imaginary friends. Grew up in the Southwest US in the 90s, and never had an imaginary friend, nor knew anyone who ever talked about having one as far as I can remember. The main thing that comes up for me is the character in Inside Out.

Are imaginary friends a sign of lonliness?

I wanted to say it sounds like a distinctly American thing, because I only ever heard about on TV, but you have a point and it might be not even that, but a distinctly American TV thing.

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