Tattling, defined as the reporting to a second party of norm violations committed by a third party, is a frequent but little-studied activity among young children. Participant observation and quantitative sampling are used to provide a detailed characterization of tattling in 2 preschools (initial mean age = 4.08 years, N = 40). In these populations, tattling represents the majority of talk about peers' behavior to third parties. It is usually truthful, it rarely refers to transgressions committed against other individuals, it is not often ignored by adults, it is performed more frequently by dominant children, and it correlates with teacher reports of relational aggression. These exploratory results suggest several new avenues of research into children's developing understanding of social norms.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 47. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 29 April 2026.
All research outputs
#1,091,966
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Outputs from Child Development
#575
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Outputs of similar age
#3,089
of 140,486 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Child Development
#3
of 14 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,952,373 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 96th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 4,970 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 27.9. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 14 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its contemporaries.
