Friday 19 November 2010

WELCOME!

Welcome to our blog watchers in the USA,  Germany, India and Japan :) Now we are an international blog.

THANK YOU!

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Do things continue to exist when we can no longer see them?

Aside from being an age-old philosophical problem, the question of our knowledge of the outside world is one that has interested developmental psychologists since Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980, one of the fathers of developmental psychology). Piaget thought that at birth infants are profoundly egocentric, not realising that anything exists beyond their own experiences and actions. It takes some time for them to understand that there exists an independent realm of objects – things that are "permanent, substantial, external to the self and in firm existence even though they do not directly affect perception".

So how do psychologists decide when a child has knowledge of the outside world?

The classic experimental paradigm for studying “object permanence” involves a search task. In this task the child has to search for an interesting object, such as a toy car, that he has watched being hidden. At the age of about seven months, children begin to start 'passing' this task, picking up the cup to reveal the toy car.

But this seems quite late. Don't children realise that the external world exists before this age?

Results gained by using a different experimental paradigm seem to suggest that object permanence develops far earlier. This second technique uses a similar task, but rather than having the child physically search for the object, they simply watch a scene unfolding in front of them whilst their reactions are observed. If they are surprised (which is judged by how long they look for) when the cup is lifted up and the toy car is not there (it has been removed through a trap door), it is inferred that they expected the car to be there and thus knew that it continued to exist when it disappeared from their sight.

But these results seem to create a paradox – the “paradox of object permanence”. Why do infants who have the motor capacity to search for objects, and who seem to know that objects continue to exist when they are hidden, fail to search for objects until they are seven months old?

One attempt to resolve this paradox claims that the infants in question do not know, in the relevant sense of the word, about the permanence of objects. The idea here is that their “surprise” at physically impossible events happening (such as a cup being lifted up and the toy car not being there) can be accounted for by their possessing some sort of perceptual residue, or after-image, of the toy car, rather than a full-blown representation of it.

An alternative attempt to resolve the paradox claims that whilst the infants do know that the toy car continues to exist, they do not actually have the necessary motor capacity to be able to search for it. Certainly, infants of 4-7 months can grab and pull and lift things, but they struggle to put sequences of these actions together in order to fulfil their goals. For example, infants of this age will not pull a blanket towards them in order to retrieve a visible toy at the other end of the rug. Furthermore, they will search for “invisible” objects in the dark when such searching does not involve complicated sequences of actions.

So?

It seems that by four months of age infants possess some idea that objects continue to exist when they cannot be seen. But are they correct in thinking this??? That's a question for the philosophers.

Sunday 7 November 2010

The Influence of Fleeting Attraction...

Compliance to a simple request can be doubled by the most innocent manipulation.
There’s little doubt that friends are easier to persuade than strangers. That emotional connection and shared history is often enough to get the poor wretches doing things they'd rather avoid, like helping us move home.
Forgive the mercenary language, but friendship is a fantastic lever for persuasion and influence, a lever we happily push on every day. Do we have to be attracted to be influenced ?
But how much does someone have to like us before we can start to influence them? And, more to the point, can only the most fleeting attraction help us persuade them to comply with a request?

Mere similarity

Jerry Burger and colleagues at Santa Clara University used a sneaky experimental set-up to test this out (Burger et al., 2001). On arrival at the lab, participants were told the study was about first impressions and were asked to choose 20 adjectives which best described them from a list of 50 supplied.
The idea, they were told, was that they would swap lists with another participant in the experiment, then fill out some more questionnaires. After which, experiment over; back to the student bar. In fact the real test was coming.
The 20 adjectives from the 'other person' weren’t really from another person, it was part of the experimental manipulation. By varying the number of adjectives the 'other person' had ticked, the researchers were dividing participants into three groups:
  • Similar: this group thought the other person had ticked 17 of the same adjectives.
  • Neutral: 10 adjectives matched.
  • Dissimilar: had only ticked 3 of the same adjectives.
The experimenters were manipulating liking between participants and the 'other person' by using what psychologists call the ‘mere similarity’ effect. This is people's tendency to like others more because of some slight similarity with themselves. It could be a friend in common or something as trivial as their names starting with the same letter.
So, when participants left the lab, what a surprise, the person they thought they had been exchanging self-descriptive adjectives with just happened to be walking down the corridor with them.
Then the moment of truth. In passing the participant was asked for a favour: would they mind reading an 8-page essay and providing a page of feedback?

 

Compliance doubled

Even this seemingly trivial manipulation of adjectives-in-common had a measurable effect. People who thought they were dissimilar only complied with the request 43% of the time. This went up to 60% in the neutral condition. But in the similar condition, compliance went up to an impressive 77%, almost double the dissimilar condition.
The experimenters also did the same experiment in a couple of other ways but reached the same conclusion. Whether the fleeting attraction was caused by choosing the same adjectives or sitting together silently for a couple of minutes, it was enough to double compliance to a request.
This experiment suggests that fleeting attraction can be remarkably powerful in changing 'no' into 'yes'. We process relatively small requests in an automatic way, using simple rules-of-thumb. When asked for a small favour by a stranger, we make a snap judgement on how much we like them based on trivial information, and this can have a huge influence on our response.

Next week's Tea and Toast discussion, Tuesday 1.15pm Gwyer Lounge.