Young children aged between two and four years believe that you only
have to hide your head to become invisible – if your legs are on view,
it doesn’t matter, you still can’t be seen.That’s according to Nicola McGuigan
and Martin Doherty who say this is probably because young children
think of ‘seeing’ in terms of mutual engagement between people. It
explains why kids often think they can’t be seen if they cover their
eyes.
Here is further discussion.
Unruly little, bugblatter beasts, all of them.
Bear and Teletubby….haha
This is such a poor experimental design,because it does not mimic the reality well
A parellel design should consist of the following:
The Bear is blindfold, and the Teletubby is not.
If the kids report that: the bear cannot be seen by the Teletubby, then it may explains somehow, assuming the 2-4 year old kid can figure out the reliable answers to the questions of experimenters.
Someone wasted money “proving” this? Any parent can tell you this.
Anderson – this would not be the first time psychologists “proved” the obvious. In fact all too much of what they do seems to be merely to publish what careful lay observers already know.
Anderson and Constant, studies also frequently disprove “obvious” things. There is value in confirming things that lay people believe and thus bringing new information into an academic body of knowledge. And often that information can have a real scientific impact if it can be combined with other, less well known facts, such as brain structures or gene expressions that change at age 2 or age 4.
In a sense scientific research is an engine for taking “obvious” and non-obvious facts, confirming them, and recombining them to produce new theories.
I second DK’s points and would add that, if anything, academia is too biased to finding contrarian results. Thus, intriguing but wrong ideas get far more play than solid work that helps us figure out which types of conventional wisdom are correct.
This experiment is muddy as hell. From their experiment it sounds like kids
simply ascribe a slightly different semantic meaning to ‘see’ when the stuffed animals
are involved (as opposed to inanimate objects). Generalizing this to explain the kids’
own perception of their ‘hiddenness’ is not justifiable, especially given that two year
olds are known to be terrible at modeling the mental state of other actors (in this
case the teletubby).
I agree that very young children don’t hide well and tend to leave body parts sticking
out where they can be seen. I play hide-and-seek with my two daughters (two and three yrs)
and the younger one doesn’t really ‘get’ how to hide properly. But the older one already
knows how to hide perfectly well.
DK: The problem with your position is that frequently the conclusions from psychological experiments like this one are iffy. So if the point of the psychologists is to firmly establish something that we already know, well, it often doesn’t.
Contrast this with developments in physics. Galileo didn’t merely firmly establish something that people already knew. He discovered something new. Archimedes discovered some new stuff. Newton discovered/invented some new stuff (e.g. the inverse square law for gravity, I think, and calculus of course in parallel with Leibniz). Einstein discovered some new stuff.
Science normally is about discovering new things. In theory, part of science could be about more firmly establishing things that we already know. That’s fine – if you’re genuinely establishing them. But if you conduct an iffy experiment with an iffy conclusion, then you haven’t made all that much headway. I get frustrated with a lot of psychology, because so much of it just seems so sloppy and thoughtless. For example an animal’s reaction to a mirror image of itself is supposed to tell us whether it’s “self-aware” – gag, don’t even get me started on that.
To Lou and Matthew:
Next time, I’m playing with you!
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