|
|
|
|
|
|
by bzbarsky
3481 days ago
|
|
|
Say 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/S0022096516... is paywalled in the usual way. |
|
|
There was actually 4 similar studies described in the article. But the first one is the most important.
The setup was that the kid would watch a video where a toy was hidden in one of two cups. The helpful person would point out to the kid in which cup the toy was hidden. The unhelpful person would not give any hints at all but rather just explain which toy was hidden. The kid would of course follow the helpful persons advice, but would have to guess in void of any advice.
The kid would then get to guess in which cup the toy was hidden, whereafter the answer was revealed in the video. However, in the successful condition, the answer was modified so the kid would guess right no matter what.
This was repeated eight times, after which the kid got to choose which person would give them advice for four more trials.
It was in this situation it showed that the kids who had always been successful did not seem to value the better advice they would expect to get from the helpful person while the kids who had failed due to lack of advice chose the helpful person.
In the article they discuss this being due to the kid trusting their own ability to guess, not needing any help.
I'd say that the results are academically interesting as they increase our understanding of children's decision making. But I don't think they should be taken out of context and be applied as a some kind of answer on how to do parenting and teaching.