A study by researchers here at Concordia was featured in this month’s “Infant Behavior and Development.” They found that babies learn can learn a person’s “trustworthiness” pretty handily.
“Infants normally mimic sounds, facial expressions and actions they observe but if an adult tricks them, they will no longer follow along with that person. Like older children, infants keep track of an individual’s history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to guide their subsequent learning,” said researcher Diane Poulin-Dubois, a professor in Concordia’s department of psychology. “Specifically, infants choose not to learn from someone who they perceive as unreliable.”
This was tested by having experimenters look inside a container with excitement then inviting infants (13-16 months) to look themselves and see what was in the box (toy or no toy).
These experimenters, using their forehead instead of their hands, pushed a button to turn on a light, to see if the infants would copy the action. 34% of infants with “unreliable testers” performed the trick but 61% of infants with “reliable testers” followed along.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me… you can’t get fooled again!
What I’m wondering, is if babies learn to trust the adults that they perceive to be reliable (which makes perfect evolutionary sense), why do they enjoy being confused so much? One of the first games I used to play with my daughter when she was a baby was “which of my hands is that thing in?” I would hide an object in my hand and offer her both closed fists to choose from to find it. She learned pretty fast that if the object was in neither hand, that I had hidden it under my leg or something (I’m not a very good magician).
Anyway, this reminds me for some reason about the Monty Python “Confuse a Cat” sketch. See for yourselves:
