7 ms·
Preschool children rarely seek data when observation and testimony conflict
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoCould this have more to do with the fact that pre-school aged children have the attention span of a puppy because their brains aren't fully developed yet?
- starkd 5y agoI don't think pre-school aged children even know where to look for the data yet.
- wccrawford 5y agoI think they do: Ask their parents or teachers. But remembering it long enough to get away from the person who told them the fact and then ask a different person... That's another story. I'd think far too much would be happening for them to bother remembering to ask. Being able to look it up independently of another human makes it a lot easier to verify information immediately, so I'm not surprised that people who can read are more likely to verify info than those who can't.
- ALittleLight 5y agoIn this test the kids are sorting figures that do or don't activate a music box. The box is left next to them so they could use the box to test the figures prior to sorting them or they could rely on what an experimenter told them (white figures activate the box) or what they observed when a different experimenter was actually using the toy. What the title means by "seek data" is "Did the kids try the figurines on the box themselves?"
- jkepler 5y agoThey also get a ton of data about the world through free play, especially outside in nature, but they experience it as play, not data gathering.
- dylan604 5y agoYet, this describes plenty of older people as well (teens/20s).
- WJW 5y agoI know this is a popular preconception and it feeds into all our biases about lazy youth that just needs to get off our lawn, but any teenager will readily out-think a preschooler.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 5y agowhoooaa, you're being very generous there. "any teenager" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. i have the unique experience of being one at one point. of course i'm being sarcastic, but some of the dumbest shit i've ever done (hopefully will ever have done) was as a teenager. a toddler does things because "they don't know any better". a teenager does things even though "they should know better". i've seen medical people talking about the brain still not fully finished baking until the 20s. so with that unfinished gushy frontal lobes and all of those raging hormones with that natural teenage angst, it's a wonder we survived as a species at all ;-)
- jjk166 5y agoThere's a difference between wisdom and intelligence. Teenagers tend to lack the former, not the latter.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoOr perhaps because the intuitions of pre-school-aged children are still forming; there's a lot they don't know, and the world is new and exciting, so scepticism would mostly just rob them of learning opportunities.
- nicoburns 5y agoFrom what I remember of being that age, I think I just didn't notice things. As an adult (and as an older child) I often get a "that doesn't seem right" feeling/intuition. As a very young child I didn't know what normal was or what the important parts of experiences were so I was much more open to things and just went with them.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoI've got used to relying on my “that doesn't seem right” feeling for determining whether I know stuff. In fields where I know enough to not feel ignorant, I say all sorts of things that don't feel wrong, but they actually are. (When talking about linguistics, for instance, I am confidently incoherent. I know this, and yet the next time I want to say something about linguistics, I do not know that I am speaking garbage.)
- cryptogeek123 5y agoGreat. Let's quickly indoctrinate them with CRT.
- ElViajero 5y ago> Elementary school children significantly increased their exploration of the dolls when their intuitions had been contradicted as compared to when they had been confirmed, frequently picking up the smallest and the biggest doll concurrently to compare their relative weight—a direct test of the claim they had been given. Preschool children rarely engaged in this behavior, whether their intuitions had been confirmed or contradicted. Interesting study. Good to make clear that this does not apply to older children. Older children will verify any surprising claims. On the other hand they suffer, like adults, of confirmation bias. If the information fits their expectation they will not check is veracity. I guess that confirmation bias is just an efficient way of learning about the world, do not waste time if things seem to fit your current understanding of the world.
- jacinda 5y ago> I guess that confirmation bias is just an efficient way of learning about the world, do not waste time if things seem to fit your current understanding of the world. Interesting observation - in this light, confirmation bias could almost be considered a variant of Occam's razor.
- vmception 5y agoCheck lists of other acknowledged biases, such as putting too much weight on earlier presented information
- naniwaduni 5y agoOccam's razor is a variant of confirmation bias.
- tantalor 5y agoyep, that's the simplest explanation.
- jamiek88 5y agoTo see a creature with not enough confirmation bias watch a horse if it encounters something even slightly usual. It will shy away and or investigate or refuse to move until you have investigated the slightly oddly positioned leaf on the path. If we did indeed check everything we nevertheless expected to be as usual we’d never get anything done and would get stuck in mega loops.
- ALittleLight 5y agoI think they should have done this with an incentive. Basically, don't ask "If I want to make the music box play, which figurine should I use?" But tell the children before the sorting task that if they make the music box play you'll give them a marshmallow. Without an incentive the kids may just not care enough to investigate.
- Yajirobe 5y agoBetter yet, threaten to punish them. It's been shown that negative reinforcement is more effective than positive
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ARandomerDude 5y agoIt's wrong to threaten to punish a child just for the fun of it, even if "fun" is cloaked in a scientific study.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoNobody said anything about fun. Punishment can be done easily and ethically in child studies. It can be as simple as starting them with a marshmallow and telling them you will take it away if they are wrong.
- watwut 5y ago1. Sweets and food should not be used as reward and punishnent in the first place. So that not eating them is not emotionally punishment, but just healthy thing to do. 2. Cue meltdown in many kids with that tactic - you bring up ecpectation and then crash it. 3. Have you people even interacted with kid? What it is with adults who seek to design punishment into situation where there is already compliance or which is about unimportant bs?
- cerved 5y agonot just children
- mrfusion 5y agoI don’t think adults are much better. “Listen to the experts” and all that.
- lwansbrough 5y agoYou are more likely to obtain the correct result from a credentialed expert than doing your own research. This should be clear in the ever growing landscape of unthinking people using “research” as a proxy for confirmation bias.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AussieWog93 5y agoThat depends on how skilled you are at performing research, and whether or not you have enough "base truth" knowledge in the domain to filter out low quality information. 9 times out of 10, though, I think your observation is correct. The people doing "research" get their information from YouTube documentaries linked to Facebook groups, and have very little practical understanding of epidemiology/nutritional content of meat/how child sex rings operate.
- casefields 5y agoGive me 1 day to cram about any disease that's remotely obscure, and I bet you I can out-test any general practitioner.
- renewiltord 5y agoYeah, for most things the hard part is building the base knowledge so you know what information is trustworthy. After that, intensity beats generality on almost anything that has documented knowledge. I agree with you.
- benrbray 5y agoSurely unless you are a doctor yourself, you cannot perform the clinical trials needed to arrive at an objective conclusion in just a day's time. So you must be relying on studies published by--gasp--experts! Phrased differently: Give a general practitioner a day's notice to read up on an obscure disease, and they'll surely run circles around YOU.
- daenz 5y agoUnless I am missing it, they don't report the results by gender, but they do by age. Is this suggesting that the results were identical across gender?
- chmod775 5y ago> Is this suggesting that the results were identical across gender? I suppose you mean sex, since using genders for preschoolers would be ridiculous. Secondly no, it's not suggesting that. It's simply suggesting they may not have grouped their results by sex, maybe because that would have made the groups too small to yield useful data, or because they simply weren't interested in that. As an aside, you shouldn't post-factum partition your data by characteristics you did not set out to compare, because then you might try height, intelligence, hair color, etc. until you find some characteristic that yields differences of "statistical significance" even though you've just been trying them all until you found something that differentiated some groups by random chance.
- daenz 5y agoWhy would age (3 groups), which they did partition on, be statistically significant but not sex (2 groups, assuming no intersex)?
- chmod775 5y agoThat's just not what I said.
- daenz 5y ago>maybe because that would have made the groups too small to yield useful data How would 2 groups be "too small to yield useful data" when 3 groups yield useful data.
- chmod775 5y agoBecause you would be subdividing again, which yields 6 groups. Also read my last paragraph about 'playing' with your data like that.
- dtrain2017 5y agoSo, pre-school children are more likely to investigate a conflict if the testimony is provided before the observation than if it is provided after. Basically, if you want to avoid confirmation bias you'll need to form your own opinion ahead of the event.
- hamilyon2 5y agoNo, neither this nor opposite was observed if i read correctly
- shreyshnaccount 5y agoI've seen grown adults rarely seek data when observation and testimony conflict
- taneq 5y agoExactly. The whole idea of structured experimentation (basically science) is relatively new and most people don't spontaneously do it unless trained to do so. Just look at the wide variety of easily falsifiable beliefs that still find widespread acceptance.
- gumby 5y agoIt’s a good heuristic. You don’t have enough data to make good generalizations, and can quickly acquire knowledge from people who (evolutionarily, else the heuristic would not be instinctual) in general won’t lie to you. And then at around six you push the reset on experiential learnings, but now with a pretty good base dataset.
- adrusi 5y agoCould it be that children lacked the knowledge of how to determine whether or not the figurines worked, or believed they were not allowed to touch them? Neither interpretation seems plausible. Recall that children had just seen the naïve experimenter place the figurines on the box, and were asked to sort the figurines by this naïve experimenter, not by the apparently knowledgeable experimenter who told them about which figurine worked. In principle, the fact that the person who asked children to sort the figurines had tried them out on the music box as children watched, and also implied that exploring the figurines would provide information about how the music box worked by saying “I don’t know how it works, but it looks like you can put these pieces on this thing here [placing a hand on the center of the music box]. I wonder what will happen if I do that!”, should have primed children’s exploration if they conceptualized such exploration as informative. Furthermore, the naïve informant left the table and sat faced away from the child during the task, attempting to remove potential social pressure not to question the informant’s testing. However, given that testing the figurines would have been audible to the nearby naïve experimenter, future studies may be useful to assess whether additional children would have tested the figurines if left in total privacy. I think that children might well have felt they weren't supposed to test the figurines on the music box itself, and this explanation doesn't completely satisfy me. The setup makes it seem like some kind of game, and testing directly on the music box might intuitively seem like cheating.
- lupire 5y agoReading that description, and knowing preschoolers pretty well, I'd suspect that the experimental setup is far too complicated for making any claims about children would interpretation the experimenters (fake!) behaviors
- joelbondurant 5y agoPerfect for the new pray to the government, pray to the science generation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- austincheney 5y agoJust preschool children? Adults on HN rarely seek data when observation and testimony conflict. The example I have observed over and over on HN is from people on the US/Canadian west coast and property prices versus availability. They shrug off any need for data by talking about high school economics. When you point out that this isn’t data others will chime in confusing apartment leases for property ownership.