Spring Staff Development Day: Research Update

By Grace Bennett-Pierre and Sophie Bridgers, Stanford psychology researchers 

Learning about how children understand the relationship between complexity, effort and time and how children help others are at the core of two studies that psychology professor Hyowon Gweon’s Social Learning Lab at Stanford has conducted at Bing Nursery School this year. 
 
We presented these two studies to the Bing staff this April as part of Bing’s spring staff development day. Bing’s music specialist Leslie Hart also presented on play in music, drawing parallels between language learning and music learning. 
 
Grace started by explaining the lab’s research on how children’s understanding of difficulty of tasks relates to decision-making. This project stems from a separate ongoing study about children’s understanding of difficulty and investigates whether children use information about difficulty when making decisions about effective collaboration on physical tasks. Researchers introduced 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children to two block structures, one that was “hard” to build (a 15-block pyramid) and one that was “easy” (a six-block structure), and told them that one puppet would build one, and another puppet would build the other. The researchers then showed children a third puppet and asked them to choose who that puppet should help. Although most of the children were able to identify the “harder” and “easier” structures, only 5-year-olds consistently said that the third puppet should help the puppet tasked with the bigger, more difficult tower. This suggests that even when children are sensitive to the concept of difficulty, they may not be able to use that understanding in their decision-making process until they are about 5 years old. 
 
The lab’s researchers have also begun collecting data for a follow-up project to determine whether younger children might be able to use their understanding of difficulty when making non-cooperative decisions. In this study, the researchers tell children that a puppet really wants to get through one of two doors to get to a cookie and that the puppet has to build one of two towers to get through a door. They ask children to pick which tower the puppet should build, with the expectation that children will choose the smaller, “easier” tower.  
 
Next, Sophie presented on children’s decisions about how to help other people, a project she has been working on with Gweon and master’s student Sara Altman. To help effectively, people need to understand why someone is struggling so they can tailor their assistance to the helpee’s needs. One important distinction is whether the cause of failure is the person’s own actions or an external factor. For example, imagine you encounter a frustrated traveler at a train station, fumbling with a ticket machine. How might you help? If the traveler is inserting the bill in the wrong direction, you might kindly re-orient the bill, but if you know the machine is out of order, you might direct the traveler to a different machine. 
 
In this study, we explore 2- and 3-year-olds’ abilities to reason about the causes of another person’s failed actions and their decisions about how to help. In the study, children learn how to make two toys play music, and then they watch as someone else tries and fails to make one of the toys work. For half of the children, this person pushes the correct button but the toy doesn’t work, suggesting the toy is broken. For the other children, this person pushes the wrong button and the toy doesn’t work, suggesting the person doesn’t know how to make the toy function. We are curious whether the way children try to help differs depending on the reason the person is struggling. So far, our results indicate that children are able to use their experience with the toys to 1) figure out why someone is struggling to make a toy work, and 2) provide help that addresses this reason (i.e., when the initial toy is broken, children are more likely to offer a replacement toy; when someone is pressing the wrong button to operate the toy, children are more likely to correct the action). 
 
Editor’s note: Grace Bennett-Pierre is the research coordinator of the Social Learning Lab at Stanford. Sophie Bridgers is a 4th-year Stanford doctoral student in psychology.