4 ms·
Ok, I must have read something wrong, but what they are saying is that children put more trust in people giving them useful clues than people giving them not us
by jonex 10y ago
Ok, I must have read something wrong, but what they are saying is that children put more trust in people giving them useful clues than people giving them not useful clues. Something that seems quite reasonable.
Which makes me confused by this quote: "... it suggests that children may not be as savvy as previous research has suggested."
Obviously a "helpful" clue that doesn't improve your chance of success (they always succeed) isn't really helpful. Isn't it quite savvy to recognise that?
If someone has gotten a better understanding of what they are actually trying to say I'd like to hear it.
There might be an interesting result in it somewhere, as it could be interpreted to imply that only slightly challenging kids in an educational context could lead them to believe that their learning efforts has no use if the challenges are adjusted to never let them fail. But I don't see how the results could be interpreted to mean what the title says.
- imp 10y agoI completely agree. They are taking a limited experiment and extrapolating to parenting in general.
- zaroth 10y agoOne experimenter gave accurate clues; the other gave inaccurate ones.... But for half of the children the game was rigged so that ultimately they would find the hidden objects. So one adult was always giving bad advice and one was always giving good advice. But in half the games it was rigged so the child always found the toy even if they looked in the wrong places. The advice from the adults was still always bad and good advice for the rigged games. Afterwards they asked the kids who they thought were more helpful. Even though one adult was giving bad advice always and one adult was giving good advice always the 4-5 years olds only discerned this if they actually lost the game when they didn't follow the good advice, even though the adult giving bad advice was always still giving bad advice. I think the key is they must have rigged the game to ensure the bad advice adult was always still giving bad advice. If the bad advice turned into good advice in the rigged version then it wouldn't work, just like you said.
- jonex 10y agoBut how can advice for winning a game be either bad or good if you will win whatever you do? That's the part I don't understand.
- dragonwolf 10y agoI think the point they were trying to make was that even though the kids had benefitted in earlier games from helpful advice and received no benefit when given unhelpful advice that by being allowed to then succeed in the rigged game the kids failed to acknowledge the value of the earlier advice. This shown by the kids not having a preference for the more helpful person. Though I think the conclusion they are drawing would really depend on the sample size of games a kid was given in order for the kid to be able to distinguish good & bad advice from the game simply being pure chance all along.
- stractract 10y agoI still don't see it. How on earth would a kid recognize unhelpful advice if it still resulted in finding the object? The kid does not know the game is rigged. I think it is more likely the article has not fully explained the experiment. It would make me sad to think this was actually published.
- bzbarsky 10y agoSay the advice is "look behind the couch in the living room" and the object is later found on the kitchen counter. And the rigging consists of the experimenter asking the kid to get something unrelated from the kitchen, for example. But yes, it's hard to determine whether this is how the experiment worked from the article. Unfortunately the actual paper at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516301035 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516... is paywalled in the usual way.
- throwaway729 10y ago