The older you get, the more you realize how green you used to be. For example, that Brussels sprouts aren’t boiled green marbles like mom and dad used to think.
In a new study, Canadian educators from the University of Toronto were able to find out how even the youngest know they are being kidded. They published their research results in the specialist magazine “Child Development”. But they also found that the older children get, the more likely they are to uncover the big and small lies of their parents. That seems plausible.
But first, let’s get to you:
The authors of the study write that they act in a similar way if they know certain statements from their parents or other people they trust that do not match their previous experiences. Earlier studies show that children over the age of six, in particular, increasingly want to obtain additional information on certain statements.
This should sound familiar to many. It’s the classic “but why is that?” phase. However, even younger children begin to show these behavioral patterns – and use it as a technique to expose lies, as the Canadian researchers found out. To do this, they observed 263 children between the ages of four and seven in a total of two experiments.
In the first study, the children were presented with three familiar objects: a rock, a piece of spongy material, and a cloth bag filled with sand. The children were then asked if they thought the stone was hard or soft. All the children stated that the stone was hard. The children were then randomly told something that contradicted their worldview: “Actually, this rock is soft, not hard.” Or they were told something that validated their intuition: “That’s right, this rock is hard.”
After this instructional statement by an adult, all the children were asked again, “Do you think this rock is hard or soft?” Almost all the children who heard statements that agreed with their point of view continued to judge as before: the rock is hard. In contrast, few of the children who were told the stone was soft continued to judge as before.
Afterward, the children were told that the adult experimenter had to leave the room for a phone call and left the children to explore the object on their own. The children’s behavior was recorded on video. The study found that most children, regardless of age, tested surprising claims.
In the second study, the children were shown eight button symbols via the video chat software Zoom. For each, the children were told that the adult had made a surprising statement: for example, “The rock is soft” or “The sponge is harder than the rock.” They were then asked how another child should respond to this statement.
It was found that older children between the ages of six and seven were more likely to advise younger ones to explore. Like touching the stone or sponge. The survey also showed that, as children grow older, they justify exploration as a means of verifying the adult’s surprising assertion. The findings suggest, the educators say, that as children grow older, even if they are just as likely to engage in exploring surprising claims, they become more aware of their doubts about what adults tell them.
This also means that children check statements that do not correspond to their level of knowledge – regardless of their age. However, their motivations could be fundamentally different, the researchers say. While younger children are more likely to check things in order to get confirmation of a possible new perspective on them, older children from the age of six are more likely to question things because they believe that something is fishy about it. Either way: In the end, everyone experiences that there is nothing to the false statements like a soft stone.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know,” said Samuel Ronfard, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. “But it is clear that children do not believe everything they are told. They think about what they’ve been told, and when they’re skeptical, they look for additional information that might confirm or refute it.”
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