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.

Is it good to think hard?

We’re in the doldrums of the school year right now.  Winter break is behind us, and the school year still has a few months to go.  It is the time of years when there is still a lot of good learning to go before classes start to focus on reviewing for end-of-year tests.

Invariably, when a student is faced with new topics, some of them are fairly easy while others are a challenge.  A particular concept in math may click, and a student breezes right through a worksheet.  That same day, a science assignment may require some real effort.  How does the amount of effort required to complete something influence whether kids (or adults for that matter) think they understand the material when they finish?

This question was examined in a paper by David Miele and Dan Molden in the August, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology:  General.

They begin by rooting their work in a theory by Carol Dweck that I have discussed before in this blog.  Dweck has pointed out that for many psychological characteristics, people may hold one of two mindsets.  They may believe that a particular characteristic is fixed and unchangeable or they may believe that a particular characteristic can be changed with experience and practice.

In this case, Miele and Molden focus on people’s beliefs about intelligence.  Some people believe that intelligence is fairly fixed and cannot be changed.  Others believe that intelligence is a skill that can be acquired with practice.

In these studies, the authors did a variety of manipulations of text passages that made them feel harder to read.  In some cases, the easy text was well written, while the hard text used bad sentence structure to make the same points.  In other cases, the text for each version was identical, but the font used for the text was made easy or hard to read. 

In each study, the authors looked at how well people believed they understood the material.  Of interest, the people who believe that intelligence is a skill tended to think they understood the material reasonably well regardless of whether the text was easy or effortful to read.  In fact, in some of the studies in this paper, people who believe that intelligence is a skill actually felt as though they understood a text better when it required effort to read than when it was easy to read.

The people who believe that intelligence is fixed showed a different pattern.  They judged that they understood the passages better when they were easy to read than when they were hard to read.  That is, for this group, putting in effort to read something was a sign that they did not understand the passage well.

Of interest, the judgments of how well people understood a passage were not explained by actual comprehension (as measured by tests of understanding).   Passages that were hard to read, were often comprehended more poorly than passages that were easy to read for all groups.  So, people’s beliefs about how well they understood a passage were not always accurate.

Why does this matter?

Effort in school determines performance in school.  Eventually, everyone runs into a task in school that is hard.  For years, a child may find assignments in language arts and English classes to be easy, and then suddenly she may find that the assignments are difficult. 

If that child assumes that intelligence is fixed, then when she reaches the difficult assignment, she will assume she did not understand what she read.  Effort is taken as a sign that she has reached her limits.  Eventually, this effort saps motivation, and leads to poor performance in school, and worse yet slowed new learning.

If that child assumes that intelligence is a skill, then when she reaches the difficult assignment, she will assume that she has to work harder to complete this assignment.  In this case, effort signals that it is time to learn something new.  This effort can lead to good performance in school and lots of new learning.

Happily, there is also evidence that people’s attitudes toward psychological factors like intelligence can be changed.  Many studies (including this one) have conditions in which they manipulate people’s beliefs about intelligence by giving them articles to read.  In one experiment in this paper, people acted as though they believed that intelligence was relatively fixed if they had just read a paper suggesting that intelligence is fixed and they acted as though they believed that intelligence was a skill if they just read a paper suggesting that intelligence is a skill.

The success of these manipulations suggests that we can help children to recognize that intelligence is a skill by reinforcing that belief in the classroom.  In that way, we can help students to realize that effort has real value in the classroom.

The upside and downside of testing.

Multiple-choice tests are everywhere.  Teachers use them, because they are easy to grade and there is an objectively correct answer.  Aptitude tests also use them for similar reasons.  The internet is full of trivia quizzes with odd questions followed by a series of potential answers.

When people are preparing to take a test, they often study by taking practice tests.  How do these practice tests affect performance on later tests?

This question was addressed by a paper in the June, 2010 issue of Memory and Cognition by Lisa Fazio, Pooja Agarwal, Elizabeth Marsh, and Roddy Roediger.  They find that taking practice tests has both positive and negative consequences for your performance on later tests.

In their experiment, they had people read passages about nonfiction topics. Then, people took a practice multiple choice test.  This test was taken either soon after reading the passages or a week later.  People also did two other tests.  One was a recall test where they had to remember the answers to questions rather than getting a set of possible answers.  Finally, everyone took a final multiple choice test at the end.  The tests asked questions both about information that was in the passages that people read as well as information taken from passages that they did not read.  This last set of questions was expected to be difficult, because people would only know this information if they had encountered it in some other place.

What happened?

Taking an initial multiple choice test as practice did improve people’s performance on tests.  They were much more likely to get the correct answer both in a recall test and also in a later multiple choice test if they studied by taking a multiple choice test.  For the cued recall test, this effect was strongest when the practice test was taken after a one-week delay rather than right away.  For the cued recall test, it didn’t matter as much whether the practice test was taken right away or later.

There was also a negative effect of testing.  In both the recall test and the final multiple choice test, there was a tendency for people to answer with one of the incorrect answers from the original multiple choice test. 

Why does that happen? 

There are two ways that people answer questions on tests.  Sometimes they know the correct answer.  For example, if I ask you the address of the White House, you may simply know that it is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  If you see that on an exam, you answer correctly, because you remember the correct answer.

Sometimes, though, a particular answer just feels familiar.  For example, if you are asked for Richard Nixon’s first Vice President, you might not remember his name specifically.  When you see the name Spiro Agnew, though, it might feel right, and you might give that as the answer.  (And you’d be right.)  Using familiarity to help you answer questions is most useful when there has been a long delay between when you first encountered the information and when you are being tested for it.

Prior multiple choice testing increases the familiarity of all of the alternatives that are part of the test.  It becomes harder to use familiarity as a strategy for answering questions when many answers begin to seem familiar.

Overall, the positives of studying by taking tests seem to outweigh the negatives.  The improvement on tests for items that were tested ranged between 5 and 20 points on the test.  You might lose a few points by getting wrong answers from the lures, but overall the effect of the lures is smaller.

Finally, the authors of this paper suggest that when you do study using a multiple choice test, you should try to get feedback on your answers immediately.  That immediate feedback allows you to focus primarily on the correct answer when you are studying and that will reduce the effect of the lures on later tests.

Say it loud: I’m creating a distinctive memory.

I’m around a lot of studying.  When I walk through the lobby of the Psychology building at Texas, I often see a few students on benches reading over their notes.  A trip to the library requires navigating a sea of students at tables and carrels deep in study.  Then, when I go home, I have three teens who are usually engaged in some kind of studying.

One thing you can say about studying.  It sure is quiet. 

Now, there are good practical reasons to want to be quiet while studying.  If you’re in a public place, it would be disruptive to the people around you to start talking.  Plus, if you are talking to yourself, that would look more than a little odd.  Even at home, you may begin to think you have lost your marbles if you start muttering to yourself while studying.

A paper by Colin MacLeod, Nigel Gopie, Kathleen Hourihan, Karen Neary, and Jason Ozubko in the May, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition, suggests that every once in a while, it might not be a bad idea if you talked a bit while studying. 

In this paper, these researchers document what they call the production effect.  They looked at people’s memory for items like a list of words.  They found that if people studied the list by reading half of the words silently and the other half by saying the words out loud, that he words spoken aloud were remembered much better than those that were read silently. 

Now, it isn’t that just reading things aloud helps, because people who read all of the items on the list aloud were no better at remembering the items than the people who read them all silently.  And both of these groups remembered the words more poorly than the words that were read aloud by the people who did half the list silently and the other half aloud.

So, what is going on here? 

One of the things that is known to help memory is distinctiveness.  We tend to remember oddballs pretty well.  An experimental example of this idea is the Von Restorff effect.  If you study a list of words where all but one are birds and the remaining item is a sport, you are much more likely to remember the oddball than to remember any particular one of the birds.  More commonly, when you meet up years later with friends from grade school, everyone remembers the names of the kids who were different from the crowd  in some way.  (If you discover that everyone from grade school remembers you, then you were probably the one who was different.)

The production effect works because it makes part of the list of items more distinctive.  The words you speak aloud are now translated into speech and you have knowledge of producing the items as well as a memory of hearing them.  All of this information makes your memory for the spoken items more distinct from the rest of the items that were read silently.

This result suggests that if you are studying material, you might want to identify those bits of information that are most important to remember and to speak those bits aloud while studying.  Even a whisper will help to make those items more memorable.