Children’s Understanding of Other People
We’ve looked at how children relate to objects during the preschool period , and also how they lack an understanding of ‘the conservation of number’. 28 But we have seen that other people have a special privilege in the world of these young infants. Does this mean they understand people in the preschool period? They certainly do. There are plenty ways of showing this and I chose one that might just have a consumption side to it. Alison Gopnik and her colleagues 29 worked with very young children aged 14 and 18 months. Firstly she showed them two bowls of food, crackers and broccoli. Kids don’t really like raw broccoli but love crackers. The important part of the experiment was when the experimenter sampled both, one after the other and pretended to love the broccoli and hate the crackers. Then she asked the child to give her one. The younger children at 14 months always gave her what they themselves liked and could not take into account the preference the experimenter had expressed. But the older children (18 months) gave the experimenter what she had expressed a liking for (the broccoli) although they didn’t like it at all.
This result is quite remarkable as it shows that 1.5 year-old children can take into account the preference of others which is a true sign of sociability and signals the onset of mutual activity in all sorts of behaviour like play and negotiation.
The rest of the preschool period sees a gradual increase in the sophistication shown in the child’s understanding of other people. This is sometimes called ‘theory of mind’ but for me a clearer term would be the child as a lay or naïve psychologist . This means as children proceed through infancy and become preschool children they demonstrate different levels of understanding of the world of people. For example between 3 and 5 years of age children develop a very profound and basic understanding of other people, knowing that they are not always right and they can make mistakes just because they have the wrong information. The child watches as Dad goes out of the door shutting it quietly. Mum shouts downstairs for him to come up and help and gets cross because Dad doesn’t answer! Our 4-year-old child knows that Mum is mistaken i.e. she has a ‘false belief ’ 30 and thinks Dad is there and he actually isn’t. From this everyday occurrence we can project a world of children’s games of hide-and-seek, playing with the truth and manipulating others. Why do preschoolers squeal and scream with delight at the pantomime when the ‘he’s behind you’ sketch is played? Welcome to the adult world where people don’t say what they mean, a world of exaggeration and puffery, 31 of whole genres of communication where impression management is the norm and ‘saying it like it is’ is itself a form of self-presentation. 32 The core concept here is representation; the child has a simple belief of others at about 4 years of age and represents that mentally and that representation includes the possibility that Mum is mistaken. Representing reality is liberating and is one large step into the adult world. But sometimes it’s not all fun and people cheat and lie. When do children understand that? And when can they separate out sarcasm, humour, irony and plain lies? Much advertising, and promotional activity whether it is for brands or in the case of celebrities their own self-image involves layer upon layer of representation and children will get more and more sophisticated (hopefully) at disentangling these as they advance toward adolescence. 33
Simple lying as behaviour is often seen in the preschool period and Evans and Lee (2013) have observed it after 2 years of age. At that age though, it’s done without taking into account the mental states of the listener. There is no attempt to instil a false belief in the listener. It’s quite common and Wilson , Smith, and Ross (2003) using naturalistic observations of lie telling at home found that 65% of 2-year-olds and 94% of 4-year-olds lied at least once. By 4 years of age they know that the listener probably doesn’t know the true state of affairs and tries to maintain that state of ignorance in the listener with lies thus demonstrating children can use their new found understanding of others having false beliefs, to some effect. However sustained lies where the follow up statements are consistent with the initial lie are difficult at this age due to limited memory function and it’s only in school age (7–8 years) that this is found in children (Talwar & Lee, 2008).
Notes
1.A popular metaphor and you might encounter ‘frame’ as well in some of the literature. Both mean that your thoughts and feelings about that time in your life or the children you see in different places like with their families or at school or playing in the street or suffering as a refugee—all these images are affected by cultural stereotypes which are simplifications and idealisations of what real children are like.
2.I am deliberately not going to attempt to answer the secondary question that is always put once heredity and environment are laid out as distinct and different sources of variation in behaviour of homo sapiens—the question being ‘which is the more important?’ followed by ‘…by how much?’
3.The consensus I think is still that it’s a uniquely human acquisition. Teaching communicative codes to chimpanzees has evolved and developed since the 1960s although at the time of writing we don’t yet have examples of groups of primates sharing and communicating using a communicative code introduced by humans.
4.For example, Cantonese has a speech sound like ‘bat’ meaning 8 and a speech sound like ‘bak’ meaning 100. To the non-Chinese listener these sound very similar apart from the ‘t’ consonant in ‘bat’ being stopped i.e. you don’t ‘breathe’ at the end of the consonant, you just stop your tongue at the back of your top teeth. Similarly the ‘k’ consonant in ‘bak’ is stopped, further back in the throat. These speech sounds have very important different meanings though.
5.The distinction here is between the involuntary or autonomic nervous system which looks after the basic bodily functions to do with breathing, excreting and so on and the voluntary nervous system which is under conscious control.
6.There was a series of experiments using the sequence the other way round, said with different voices, intonations and the results were very similar showing us that the finding is robust.
7.A relevant and readable source is Reicher et al. (2010).
8.I am talking here about adaptation in the evolutionary sense where over many generations there are gradual genetic changes for men and women according to principles, some dating from Darwin. There is no evidence that the skills of your father for example are transferred directly to you i.e. behaviour is not inherited directly as such.
9.Before some of you quibble about terms like ‘nutritional value’ let me pre-empt any discussion by stating that a diet of high caloric density foods is not necessarily good for you. In the context of the natural history of eating however sites where foraging is done are often places where the risk of attack from predators is high as attention to foraging lessens the attention given to other things like predators. The solution is to go for calorically dense foods, eat fast, and go. Think eating fish and chips on a summer day in a place like St Ives where hungry seagulls also hang out.
10.Try Hovinga (2009) for a promotional video of BabyPlus, a speaker that sits on the pregnant mother’s belly. It emits tones. Also, Evidence based parent (2014, April 26) for a good blog-based critique.
11.The human heart beat has a quasi-mystical status among some artists and musicians like John Cage whose opus called 4’ 33’’ celebrated silence and introspection where you can hear your heart beat.
12.You’ll know what the—phobia part means and the toko—is from the Greek tokos meaning childbirth.
13.For a well-written and up-to-date account see Adolph and Robinson (2015).
14.Literally ‘newborn’.
15.A term originally used by Basil Bernstein which has gone out of fashion now and desperately needs resurrection. The best description in a long time comes from Atherton (2013). The reason why speech in elaborated code is so intrusive is because it can be understood without contextual cues being required—it stands alone.
16.Lucky Scottish oldies can travel free anyp
lace in that country at any time with the appropriate free bus pass.
17.When researching this book I was struck by a comment made by Adolph and Robinson (2015) in their discussion of motor development when they described the classic ‘infant motor milestones’ chart (op. cit., Fig. 4.1) showing at what ages children usually achieve mastery of certain skills of moving about such as ‘sits without support’. The schematic children are totally isolated from any environment and are schematic outline drawings of an infant.
18.Many of these activities will be monopolised by mum and the infant will not make an active contribution but will recognise and anticipate the events if they become routine.
19.These findings are in sympathy with Gibson’s approach to perception (see section called “Perception” in Chapter 3).
20.This is NOT a prescription for using your friendly neighbourhood mall as a baby minder. Some children are intolerant of changing visual and aural stimuli and it can be too much for them.
21.Piaget called infant development the sensorimotor period of development with the emphasis on simple mental constructs occurring in between perception and action.
22.The playground is a useful setting for finding commercial brands, originating with the swopping of cigarette cards earlier last century to Pokémon (card version) and the content of lunch boxes. See for example Harman and Cappellini (2014).
23.Allocentric is the opposite of egocentric in Piaget’s theory and means being able to take another person’s point of view. For the preschool child this was limited according to Piaget and only interpretable with regard to what children see, hear etc., i.e. at the level of perceived reality.
24.Projection is attributing your own thought feelings and desires on to another person. Very useful in family disputes.
25.But interestingly they mix up ‘more’ and ‘less’ at this age and for many of them at that age, ‘less’ was understood as ‘more’. See Donaldson and Balfour (1968).
26.For anyone who wants to explore this literature in more detail the references are available in the full-text version of this paper.
27.As reflected in the playground saying: ‘finders keepers, losers weepers!’
28.They also can’t cope with other concepts like ‘amount’ and think that there is more Play Doh when it’s changed by moulding it from a ball into a big snake (without anything being added or taken away of course).
29.A video of Gopnik’s experiment can be found at Adam (2013b, March 11).
30.A more formal way of putting it—if you’re searching for more on this then use ‘false belief’. ‘Theory of mind’ will also provide helpful sites.
31.What advertisers call part of their trade and still claim to be honest and not deceitful. It’s culturally accepted exaggeration which (hopefully) no reasonable person would take literally.
32.What seems to have emerged in the latter part of the 2010s is the acceptance of ‘my truth’ as a valid aspect of one’s self-presentation and in a sense protected as refutation is not permissible and could be seen as violation.
33.The world of the teen and pre-teen is preoccupied with what X really thinks about Y’s opinion of Z which A thought was…This complex tangle of relationships is maintained not just in face-to-face communication but also using social media and is one of the wonders of the twenty-first century world.
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