By Chia-wa Yeh, Head Teacher and Research Coordinator
How do children learn about themselves? Do they actively seek out information from others about things like their abilities or personality?
Peter Zhu, a fourth-year doctoral student in Stanford’s Department of Psychology, has been studying these questions at Bing Nursery School for several years. He’s part of the Social Learning Lab, overseen by his adviser, Professor Hyowon Gweon, and so far, more than 200 Bing children have participated in his studies. Zhu has become a beloved member of our community who enjoys an easy and warm rapport with the children. He grew up in Davis, California, and earned his bachelor’s degree in cognitive science and psychology from Johns Hopkins University. Besides his research, Zhu’s passions include playing tennis, hiking, and cooking.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Zhu about his academic work and the time he’s spent at Bing:
Tell us about your research interests and studies.
My research interests center around the following question: How do we learn and think about ourselves? While a lot of prior work in the domain of cognitive development has focused on how children learn about the world around them, I’m particularly interested in how children learn and reason about themselves, including their abilities, personality, and more. Learning about ourselves is critical to growing up: To guide our actions in this complex world, we need to understand what we are good at, what others think of us, and who we are.
My research primarily uses experimental behavioral methods with children to answer these questions. At Bing, I’ve run a variety of studies that investigate children’s curiosity about themselves (focused on how a researcher thought about a drawing they made), and how they reason about themselves (in particular, how they reason about their past interactions with a toy or machine and use this information to guide their future actions).
How did you become interested in this line of research?
I first became interested in developmental science as an undergraduate. I took an intro-level cognition course, and we had a module about developmental cognitive science. The instructor started off with a simple observation: The goal of cognitive science is to study and understand the human mind, and only one biological organism in the world has figured out how to engineer a mind. That organism is the developing child. The point being that studying developing children (in particular, how they learn, what knowledge they have, and more) can give us particularly strong purchase on the components that make a mind and, consequently, what makes us human. From that moment, I was hooked!
After taking the cognition course, I joined a developmental science lab as a research assistant. I got particularly interested in social cognition (i.e., how children reason about other people and agents around them) and quickly realized that the field seemed to be missing one key thing: How does the child factor in as an agent themselves? How do children even think about themselves? I then learned more about this topic by reading foundational work in the field, and some of those experts are here at Stanford, like Dr. Carol Dweck.
Tell us about the studies you’ve conducted at Bing.
One of the most important and extensive studies I’ve run at Bing is a project that investigates children’s curiosity about themselves. Specifically, one powerful way in which children may learn about the self is through receiving information from others. Although recent work demonstrates that children care about, and even attempt to manage what others think about the self, relatively little is known about children’s desire to seek out information about the self. Across two studies, we asked: Are children curious to find out what others think about them, and do they actively seek out this information?
In Study 1, with 40 children aged 3 to 5, children were assigned to either the “Self” or the “Other” condition. Children were invited to make a drawing and told that another child named “Jordan” (presented with a photo gender-matched to the child) had also made a drawing. The researcher placed the two drawings (the child’s and Jordan’s) in separate folders and said he would evaluate both drawings and place a sticker inside of the folder if the drawing was “really good” but not if it was “just OK.” After evaluating the drawings out of sight in a corner of the room, the researcher stepped out of the room, pretending to answer a phone call, but left behind one of the folders on the table in front of the child (the researcher kept an eye on the children throughout). The only difference between the two conditions was which folder the child was left with: either the folder that contained their own drawing (“Self”) or Jordan’s drawing (“Other”).
Children were left with the folder in the room briefly, and we measured whether children peeked at the folder to gain information about what the researcher thought of the drawing, and if they peeked, how long it took them to peek. Notably, all children received a star, and the drawing was never actually evaluated, but since the “evaluation” occurred out of sight, children were uncertain whether or not there was a star and would have to peek in order to satisfy their curiosity. The question is: Are children more likely to peek when it is their drawing (Self condition)?
As predicted, children in the Self condition were more likely to peek inside the folder (13 out of 20 versus 5 out of 20) and peek more quickly compared to children in the Other category. Yet, one might ask: Is it possible that children were peeking more in the Self condition simply because children value stickers, and more children wanted to see the sticker inside “their” folder?
To address this possibility, we conducted Study 2 with 72 children aged 3 and 4. This time, the sticker was replaced with a paper slip with a circle on it, which has no intrinsic value. Study 2 replicated Study 1’s findings: Children in the Self condition were more likely to peek (20 out of 36 versus 11 out of 36) and faster to peek than children in the Other condition.
What do the results tell you?
We take these results to suggest that even early in life, children are curious to know what others think about them; children were more willing to peek inside the folder to attain information about their own drawing than a peer’s. This suggests that children actively seek out information about themselves from others.
Describe your experience working with children at Bing and how it inspired your research. Any tips for establishing a rapport with them?
I’ve had an absolute blast working with children at Bing; I am constantly impressed by how the teachers operate the classroom and how the children play and interact with each other. In terms of establishing rapport, I usually recommend that researchers allow children to show them what they are working on in the classroom, to ask children to say a little bit about what they are interested in and like to do in the classroom, and to allow children to lead you!
My experience in the classroom has definitely impacted the way I think about science: In fact, part of my research on how children learn about themselves was inspired by the children’s behaviors in the class. I would observe that they were very eager to share their work and accomplishments with others, but also that they would sometimes ask for help when they felt that doing something was outside of their abilities or comfort. While these behaviors are seemingly innocuous, they reflect a deeper understanding of their competence and of themselves, and they flexibly deployed this to show off their abilities, persist on some tasks, and ask for help on others.
What are your next steps?
In the next version of our study, we’re extending the curiosity task to another domain by asking whether children are curious to find out other kinds of information about themselves. The researcher will ask children about their favorite things and input their answers in a machine (e.g., a laptop computer), which will tell them what kind of animal they can be like. We then measure whether children are curious to figure out what animal the machine says they are. (We make sure to end the study by reassuring children that they can be many types of animals.) In preliminary data, we’re finding that children are indeed curious to figure out what animal they are like.
Could you tell us about Bing Nursery School’s function as a site for training PhD students for their future careers?
As developmental scientists, we’re very lucky to have Bing as a resource, not only to collect data for our studies but also to work with an awesome and rich environment of staff, teachers, and students. Almost every developmental psychology PhD student has gone to Bing to work with the children, simply because it’s such an amazing place! We can get really tailored, hands-on experience with children in an environment that is so welcoming to research (both from the staff side and the family side), and I feel really grateful to have had my training as a scientist at Bing.