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.

Talking about products and preference for products

I was thinking back recently on a trip that I took to Europe.  The trip went through Pescara, Italy and Sofia Bulgaria.  In Pescara, I had some really great meals.  After eating a particularly delicious ravioli, it might make sense to say, “Wow, the food in Italy is fantastic.”  But, if I had eaten a disappointing slice of pizza (which never happened), I might have said, “This slice of pizza is disappointing.”  On the other hand, the food in Bulgaria was passable at best, leading me to conclude that the food in Bulgaria is disappointing.  One of the lunches was quite good, though, and so I might be tempted to comment that this particular meal was enjoyable.

In these examples, when the quality of the food was consistent with my overall belief, then I used more abstract language (talking about the food overall), but when it was inconsistent with my belief, then I used more specific language (talking about just that meal). 

It is quite common to change how abstractly you speak based on the consistency of your experience with your attitudes.  Gun Semin and Klaus Fiedler noted that we tend to talk about people this way in a 1988 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  When someone you like gets angry, you are likely to describe what happened as yelling at someone.  When someone you don’t like gets angry, you label them as aggressive.

A paper in the August, 2010 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research by Gaby Schellekens, Peeter Verlegh, and Ale Smidts extended this observation to products.  They had people describe products.  For example, in one study, people try out either Bic pens (which people tend to think of as cheap and low quality) or Parker pens (which people tend to think of as expensive and high quality).  The pens were manipulated so that they did not work.   Then, they had to pick a statement that best described their feeling about the pen.  For the Bic pen, people selected abstract statements (like “This Bic pen is bad.”).  For the Parker pen, people selected more specific statements (like “This Parker pen would not write.”).  In other studies, the authors looked at the descriptions people gave spontaneously both for good aspects of products and bad ones.

The authors then extended this work in an interesting way.  These descriptions affected people who heard them as well.  People who heard an abstract positive description (“This pen is great.”) were more likely to say that they would buy one than people who heard a specific positive description (“This pen writes well.”).  People who heard an abstract negative description (“This pen is awful.”) were less likely to say that they would buy one than people who heard a specific negative description (“This pen writes badly.”).

This work is important, because the people who describe products choose the abstractness of what they say unconsciously.  That is, they are not specifically trying to be persuasive when they use this language.  Yet, these abstract statements are treated as more persuasive (either positively or negatively) than specific statements.  Furthermore, you are not likely to notice how abstractly things are being described to you.  So, the language that is used to describe things can have an impact on your attitudes without your awareness of where that attitude is coming from.

I like you, because I always feel good around you and I don’t know why

How do you know that you like someone or something?  Often, seeing a person you like gives you a good feeling inside or makes you smile.  You have that reaction far before you could say exactly why you like that person.  Indeed, you might find it hard to put into words exactly why you like them, but you know you do. 

There is a lot of work in Psychology showing that you can come to like someone (or some thing for that matter) not because of anything they have done, but just because you tend to feel good when you are around them.  There is a procedure called evaluative conditioning that shows how this can happen.

As one example, Michael Olson and Russell Fazio presented studies in the journal Psychological Science in 2001.  They had people stare at a computer screen while images were presented to them very rapidly (at a rate of 1.5 seconds per image).  They told people that they were studying people’s ability to do surveillance in a complex environment.  The images consisted both of pictures (of different Pokemon characters) as well as words.  Sometimes, more than one word or picture appeared on the same screen.  In fact, one Pokemon character was repeatedly paired with positive words and images (like the word excellent or a picture of a sundae).   A second character was repeatedly paired with negative words and images (like the word terrible or a picture of a cockroach).  Later, people were asked to rate how much they liked the character.  People consistently gave higher ratings to the character that was paired with positive words and pictures than to the character that was paired with negative words and pictures.  This difference occurred, though the participants in the study were not aware of which words and images had appeared with the characters. 

So, what is going on here?  In a May, 2009 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Christopher Jones, along with Russell Fazio and Michael Olson argue that this change in evaluation of the objects occurs because of a mis-attribution of the good feeling to the object.  That is, in these kinds of experiments, the positive words and pictures make the person feel good.  They are not sure why they feel good, so the good feeling is attached to the Pokemon character that is consistently associated with feeling good.  Likewise, the negative words and pictures make them feel bad.  They are not sure why they feel bad, so they attach the negative feeling to the Pokemon character that is consistently associated with feeling bad. 

Often, of course, this strategy is a pretty good one.  If there is a person in the world, and you usually feel good around that person, chances are that person is making you feel good.  If there is a person and you usually feel bad around them, chances are that person is making you feel bad.  However, this strategy can lead to the wrong outcome too.  You may end up liking people and things you encounter in positive situations more than perhaps you should.  Similarly, you may end up disliking people and things you encounter in negative situations more than you should.