The assumption was tested that children who blame only the listener for communication failure do not understand that the listener's needs must be taken into account for communication to be effective. Child speakers were asked to give a ‘hard’ message about one of a set of drawings, thereby making it difficult for the listener to choose the matching one from his identical set. With these instructions, 42 out of 86 children aged between 5:4 and 9:10 sent messages that referred to more cards than did their corresponding messages given under neutral or ‘easy’ instructions. Of the 18 listener blamers in the sample, only two managed this. The proportion of children who could give harder messages increased from listener blamers, through intermediates, to speaker blamers both for the whole sample ( P < 0·0001) and for the subsample spanning the age range in which listener blamers occurred ( P = 0·016). Further validation for the ‘whose fault’ technique was provided by the finding of a trend towards the giving of better ‘standard’ and ‘easy’ messages through the categories of listener blaming, intermediate, and speaker blaming ( P = 0·001).
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Robinson et al. (1978) studied this question.