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It feels like you are shifting the goalposts here, but I potentially misunderstand your original objections. In your first comment, you say that "maybe the bab
by Cogito 10y ago
It feels like you are shifting the goalposts here, but I potentially misunderstand your original objections.
In your first comment, you say that "maybe the babies had just completely forgot about the experimenter and his wrapped-up hands and didn't even "tap" the box but more like "bumped into" it hands-first". That is, we can't judge the intent of the babies and so we can't determine why they use their hands instead of heads.
I agree that we can't ask babies what their intent is and have them verbalise the response, but that is not the same thing as being unable to determine intent. Indeed, asking and listening to a response is just one form of setting up an experiment and evaluating the response. Of course there may be reasons we can't think of, but the scientific method gives us a framework to explore those ideas.
Hypothesis: babies can recognise constraints upon action when observing action. When mimicking this action later, if not under the same constraint, the babies will modify the action in order to achieve the outcome of the action as simply as possible.
The null hypothesis here would be every baby performing the same action regardless of constraints observed.
So, if after seeing the button pusher with hands tied, and at other times without hands tied (using different babies in each case of course), we would expect to see no difference in how the babies pushed the button. If they were simply "bumping into" the button with their hands, they would do so an equivalent number of times in each group of babies. Assuming everything else was controlled for (which we can't know for certain, but is reasonable to assume) then the hypothesis holds.
If the babies were "moving completely at random" we would expect to see completely different outcomes then what were observed.
Your objection about rationality is probably more about scope or context of definition. The researchers seem to be using 'rational' as a shorthand for 'understands constraints and can remove them in order to achieve the desired outcome'.
For example, if the observed uses their head to push the button and their hands are not tied, it is 'rational' to believe that the head must be used to push the button. If the hands are tied, however, it is more 'rational' to believe that the head is being used because the hands are tied - the constraint is recognised.
Finally the second paragraph says "all infants who watched the adult perform under both conditions" not "all infants". That is, there was a group of babies shown both ways to push the button, and those babies chose to use their hands every time and not their heads.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago>> It feels like you are shifting the goalposts here, but I potentially misunderstand your original objections. I have several objectsions about this and similar studies, so I may sound like I'm changing the subject, sorry about that. I'm not sure where I did that, but it's not my intention to shift the goalposts, I feel I'm being consistent. >> The null hypothesis here would be every baby performing the same action regardless of constraints observed. That's just not a valid null hypothesis. Not when you're dealing with living things, particularly human beings, even if they're babies. There's absolutely nothing to say what a person, even a baby, will do in a certain situation. We are not automata, or if we are some sort of automaton we are a type of automaton that is too complex for us to understand and predict. In that sense I don't see how there can even be a valid null hypothesis. We don't even know what to expect in the first place, so what are we comparing some specific observation to? The idea is that the study has "controls", but note we're not even given the numbers of the subjects the experiment involved. Even the bar chart on the right has percentages rather than numbers- why? Well, because it probably involved a dozen subjects or so. A couple of dozen? Probably not more than that. We're talking about tiny, tiny numbers here. There's not really enough to seriously talk about "controls". And my intuition is that if the study was done on, say, a few hundred babies, results supporting the researchers' conclusions would dissolve into thin air. But- who knows? As to the main hypothesis: >> Hypothesis: babies can recognise constraints upon action when observing action. Why is that a valid hypothesis to state in the first place? It's making some assumptions about the baby's mind, specifically that it's the same kind of mind, in the same kind of context, as that of the person who stated the hypothesis. Well- that sort of assumption is something that has to be tested in the first place. We can't just hand-wave that fundamental question away with a "duh, it's a human baby so". Social sciences have a tendency to make gigantic leaps of reasoning like that, and bridge the gap between observed behaviours with assumptions and common sense, or other social scientists' theories. There are so many things that is probably impossible to evern know for sure about our minds, no matter how much science we throw at them, or at the very least it will takes us generations upon generations of painstaking research to figure out- yet, a lot of the people who study minds and behaviour will gladly take them for granted and publish a paper taking them for granted, then others will cite that paper, build upon its baseless assumptions and add their own on top. That's not science- that's turtles all the way down. >> there was a group of babies shown both ways to push the button, and those babies chose to use their hands every time and not their heads. I do think that's what I meant but even so- what does that tell us? Who says that's not what should be expected? We're back to forming a valid null hypothesis, and I don't see how that is established.