Even young kids figure out what you like from what you choose

We figure out a lot about the people around us from what they do rather than what they say.  The actions people take say a lot about what they truly want, while the statements people make may not reflect what they truly believe.  That is why we prefer people who ‘walk the walk’ over those who ‘talk the talk,’ and we push people to ‘put their money where their mouth is.’

What allows us to figure out what people really like from their actions?  When do we learn to do that?

This question was taken up in a paper by Tamar Kushnir, Fei Xu, and Henry Wellman in an August, 2010 paper in Psychological Science. 

They start with a simple example.  You can figure out whether people’s actions tell you what they like when there is a clear choice in the world and people do something systematic in that case.  Imagine you go to a candy store and all they have is chocolate.  You bring your friend to the store and tell her to buy something.  She buys chocolate.  It is hard to say from this choice that she really likes chocolate.  All there was in the whole store was chocolate.  Maybe she prefers Gummi Worms, but they weren’t available.

But, what if you take your friend to a store that has chocolate on every aisle, but then there is also one display case with Gummi Worms.  Now, if she buys Gummi Worms, you can safely assume she really likes them.  After all, if she just grabbed something in the store by chance, she probably would have gotten chocolate.  The fact that she picked something rare in the store means that she must really like it.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, but Kushnir, Xu, and Wellman looked at whether 3- and 4-year-olds could reason in the same way.  They had children in the study look at a box of toys.  Some boxes only had one kind of toy in them (like soft baseballs).  Another box had two toys in it (like soft baseballs and soft basketballs).  A third box also had two types of toys, but there were mostly toys of one type and a few of the other (a lot of soft basketballs and just a few soft baseballs).

Now, the children watched as a puppet took five toys out of the box.  In each case, the puppet took five of one type of toy out of the box (say, soft baseballs).  Then, the puppet went away.  The child was shown three toys, the two from the boxes and a third that they had never seen before (like a green golf ball).  The puppet came back, and the child was asked to give the puppet the toy it liked best.

The children were quite smart about this.  When the box only had toys of one type, then the children gave the puppet each of the three toys about equally often.  That is, they seemed to realize that the puppet had no choice but to pick one type of toy, and so that didn’t tell them much about what the puppet really liked. 

When the box had two types of toys and there were many more of one type than the other and the puppet consistently picked the rare toy, then the children almost always gave the puppet the toy it had picked. 

When the box had the same amount of each kind of toy, then the children also gave the puppet the toy it had picked, but they did so a bit less consistently than when the toy was really rare.

This result (as well as the results of a follow-up study with 20-month-old infants in the same paper), suggest that humans are very good at figuring out what other people want just from what they do.

It is important that we have this ability from fairly early in life.  The psychologist Mike Tomasello has argued that humans are very good at passing along culture, because children are able to figure out why people are doing what they do from watching what people are doing.  As a result, children learn quickly how to perform actions that will allow them to achieve desirable goals. 

In addition, in order to figure out how to succeed in our social groups, we have to be able to predict what people will do in the future.  By using people’s actions as a guide to their thoughts and preferences, young children help to fit themselves into their network of caregivers and friends.

Psychology: It isn't rocket science

When you sign on to be a Psychologist, you have taken on the study of a topic that is both extraordinarily complex and underappreciated.  Many people have an interesting attitude toward Psychology.  On the one hand, they  are interested enough to want to read news stories and blog entries, but on the other hand they often get the sense that Psychology isn’t doing the heavy lifting of “hard” sciences like chemistry and physics.  Even within the scientific community, Psychology is often the Rodney Dangerfield of sciences.  There are plenty of Nobel laureates like Roger Penrose and Francis Crick who decide that after winning their prize, they will turn their attention to a simpler science and clean it up--only to discover that Psychology is harder than it looks.

There is some evidence that this attitude toward Psychology starts early.

A paper in the February, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Frank Keil, Kristi Lockhart and Esther Schlegel studied attitudes toward a variety of sciences from Kindergarten through adulthood.  They found that as early as second grade, kids see Psychology as explaining things that are easier to understand than the natural sciences (Biology, Chemistry, and Physics) or even Economics.  (In their sample, these differences went away in the group of adults, but their adult sample consisted largely of college students, many of whom were getting course credit in psychology classes for their participation.)

Why does this happen?

There are a few things that seem to be related to people’s attitude that Psychology is easier than other sciences.  For one, children think it would be easier to learn about aspects of Psychology than to learn about the natural sciences.  They are also more sure that adults would know how things work in Psychology than in the natural sciences. 

The authors did rule out one explanation.  They found that children and adults were no better at distinguishing between facts that are true and false in psychology and in other sciences.  That is, people don’t believe that Psychology is easier because they actually know more about it.  They believe that Psychology is an easier science than the natural sciences because it feels easier.

A key aspect of thinking about Psychology is that we all have minds.  We all have conscious experiences of what it is like to think.  Those experiences give us intuitions about the way our thought processes work.  Even though those intuitions are often misleading, it feels like a good scientific explanation for those thought processes are just beyond our grasp. 

The authors point out that this facet of Psychology has some important practical consequences.  For example, judges in legal trials are often much less likely to allow Psychologists to give expert testimony on the workings of the mind than they are to allow other scientists to give expert testimony.  The judges see the relevant Psychology as part of a juror’s common sense.

I realize that a blog entry like this may be preaching to the choir, but it is important that we find ways to get beyond this sense that Psychology is just studying things that are already obvious.  People struggle with addictions.  They go into counseling to seek help with navigating their daily lives.  Companies seek help making employees happier, more productive, and better innovators.  The answers to these questions come from the science of Psychology.  It really is time for Psychology to sit proudly and unapologetically at the scientific table.