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© The Author(s) 2018
Brian M. YoungConsumer Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0_8
8. Childhood and Younger Children: The Gaze from Developmental Psychology
Brian M. Young1
(1)The Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Brian M. Young
Email: b.m.young@exeter.ac.uk
Younger Children
We now come to one of the main sections of this book, dealing with children and young people. I have already mentioned that children and childhood is usually viewed through a lens 1 by most people and that we possess various ‘images of childhood ’ (see Chapter 2 section on “Images of Childhood”) that often centre round the two opposing poles of ‘innocent ’ and ‘imp ’ (or ‘child’ and ‘kid’ to give a more updated version). And I have looked at the commercially available goods and services for the expectant mother and her family when we were looking at ‘having a child’ (see Chapter 7 section on “Having a Child”). So we will now focus on conception, the start of the process by asking the question: What is potentially there at that point, inherited from the biological parents and what will be the contribution from the environmental experiences that will occur and af
fect the growing embryo then foetus through to birth and beyond? I suppose answers concerning hair colour or inherited diseases could be forthcoming but I am assuming we want an answer to questions dealing with psychological characteristics such as intelligence or personality. This vexed question is one that is often framed as ‘heredity versus environment’ or ‘nature versus nurture’ and the easiest first answer is ‘replace versus with and’. Because each part whether it’s the inherited bit or the environmental one works with the other and although they can be separated conceptually you will only encounter them in a living organism working together. 2 So they are abstractions although how inherited characteristics are coded in the human genome is an ongoing immensely valuable research issue as is the development of life in an intrauterine environment .
Predispositions from the Past
It is legitimate though to identify whether there are any predispositions we possess just because we are members of Homo sapiens but before we plunge in we need to specify what evidence is admissible to make these claims. There are (at least) three sources. The first is that, as a species we have evolved mental structures as well as behavioural propensities which are a good fit with our bodies (such as hands with finger-thumb opposition for exploring our environment). These adaptive propensities come under the heading of evolutionary psychology (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013) and will surely help us as we grow up. Cosmides and Tooby (op. cit.) in their brief conclusion simply state that evolutionary psychology is a framework which has general applicability across psychological science (op. cit., p. 224) and that it can provide hypotheses on how the mind is designed. Consequently I would see it as similar to a lifespan developmental framework in the sense that; if knowing some of the visions psychologists have about where we are going and where we have come from as we grow up is helpful, then similarly knowing what we evolved from originally can also provide more understanding. In addition the emphasis on process and the evolution of humanity is in line with the life-span theme and other similar time based processes that comprise an important frame and vision of this book.
Doing Experiments with Babies
The second way is to do experiments with newly born babies . These cause no harm to the child and provide us with invaluable information on the skills and predispositions of the neonate. We then can infer that if they can do certain things and there’s no time to have learnt that outside the womb, then it must be there in their minds in some meaningful sense when they were born. The last and weakest way is to look for cultural universals. If all cultures have ceremonies surrounding death and birth for example then we might assume that these two rather profound milestones in one’s life are there when we are born in the sense that we are predisposed to gradually slip into the cultural roles that are prepared for us—or at least recognise them. Maybe Freud was right then and Eros (the life force) and Thanatos (the death force) are in everyone’s psyche. But we don’t know whether it’s just at this point in our history all cultures are and were like that because that’s the ways cultures are designed by humans or whether it’s also an implicit and natural way to think about why we are here.
So, what predispositions do we recognise as being present at birth? Certainly language is a prime candidate and recognised as a peculiarly human skill 3 that other animals cannot acquire. Noam Chomsky claimed that a language-acquisition device or LAD needs to be assumed and we have already seen (Chapter 3 section on “Metaphor”) that metaphor is a use of language that is universal and characterises much of human thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). It has also been claimed that there are two universal categories for things represented in language as nouns and actions/changes of state which are called verbs (Pinker , 1994, p. 284) so we are naturally predisposed to carve the world up into these two categories. The ability to categorise and classify language input is helped if we are predisposed some way to work with language as a sequence of discrete and distinct units rather than a jumble of sounds. In some classic and imaginative experiments with very young babies , Eimas , Siqueland, Jusczy, and Vigorito (1971) demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between speech sounds like /p/ and /b/ which possess what are known as distinctive features of difference just because the difference between these two sounds contribute to a difference in meaning of many words. Think ‘pin’ and ‘bin’. Eimas and others did not just use English and their conclusions are about language in general and not specific to English. Other languages have contrasts that are distinctive but they can be found elsewhere 4 in the speech sound system for that language. This seems amazing as infants just a few months old would not surely be able to distinguish between these sounds at that age as their experience is so limited. How do you do these experiments and find out what’s going on in the very young child’s mind? The main psychological process that is used is called habituation and it could be happening to you right now. Is there a clock in your room? Can you hear the tick? Probably now you can hear it. The ‘same’ sound repeated again and again means that we habituate to it as it becomes less and less important to us to hear it and be aware of it. We hear when it has stopped though. Now it’s not just a specific sound that I can habituate to but rather categories of sounds that mean the same to me. As I walk down the street there is a general hubbub of voices but if someone called out ‘Brian!’ (my first name) or ‘hey!’ I would certainly hear that as I am tuned into attention grabbing human vocalisations for that stroll in a busy street (a familiar ecology for me). Or I skim/speed read my newsfeed on my phone and can pick out immediately a ‘relevant’ word. Habituation is a process that emerges very early in development and is an integral part of the process of learning. Now the next problem for the budding behavioural psychologist exploring the infant mind is to decide which behaviour to try and plug into to gain access to the mental world of categories. Babies have a limited repertoire of things that they can do voluntarily 5 like gaze (length of time), sucking (rate), and head turning (direction) so we have a small range of natural behaviours to work on. Eimas (op. cit.) chose sucking and created an artificial nipple that recorded various parameters of sucking behaviour in very young babies . The little one was placed in a seat, the nipple in her mouth and could see and hear various stimuli while sucking away on this pacifier. The experiment discussed here used a speech sound synthesiser and the one that produced interesting results was a sequence of sounds that for the adult sounded like a sequence of the word ‘pin’ transitioning through to a sequence of the word ‘bin’. 6 In fact the sounds generated produced a relatively smooth signal over time without an obvious ‘blip’ or radical change into the ‘b’ sounds. In other words the physics of the sound sequence was by no means the same as the perceived sound sequence as perceived by adults. The research question then was: Will very young children perceive this the same way? We can’t ask them of course but we can observe their behaviour. And yes we hear the drone of ‘p’ sounds as the synthesiser approached the switch to ‘b’ which didn’t affect the gradual habituation of the sucking then a big surge in sucking when the ‘p’ emerged with a gradual behavioral lessening as the ‘p’ sounds continued. So in conclusion there is good evidence that children are born predisposed toward learning language naturally, quickly, and effectively and this is helped by a propensity to segment at all levels, phonetically as well as by using higher order linguistic structures.
Social Animals
It is a truism to say that we as a species are social animals and one consequence of this tenet is that the collective called the group has a special privilege in how we tend to conduct our social affairs. Whether it is the family where much collective consumption is learnt and transmitted or the wider social group one claims allegiance to or even the nation state that goes to war, groups in general have an important role to play in any discussion of patterns of consumption. Why are groups and group membership an essential part of human social life? Social identity theory 7 which had its roots in the theories of Henri Tajfel provides us with an answer to this question. Accord
ing to Reicher , Spears, and Haslam (2010), one’s identity in the sense of self-definition can include the group one belongs to and not just the roles we occupy relative to other individuals. Once we admit this into our theories of who we are, then we have a complementary relationship between society and the individual (op. cit., p. 48). To pursue the metaphor, the blending together of the streams of social psychology which traditionally has focussed on the individual embedded in a social context, and the varieties of sociology extant where the individual is often a problematic construal at the intersection of different social processes together produce a novel mix that does justice to consumption practices of groups acting together at a Glastonbury festival or hanging out at the mall or being engaged in social media communities or adopting a life-style that incorporates green activist politics and family life. The authors also recognise the potential for reconceptualising traditional economic behavioural concepts such as subjective utility of different courses of action where one of the selves is social identity with a serious collective interpretation. In my opinion this would be appropriate in for example looking at adolescent collective consumption or the consumer practices of extended families where the collective self embedded in mutual living with associated obligations is particularly strong.