Young children trust kindness over expertise

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Young children are surprisingly discerning. By age three they are already more trusting of claims made by nice people. Slightly older and they also understand expertise: four- and five-year-olds realise that a person described as an eagle expert will have knowledge in related topics, such as birds in general and biology. This raises an interesting question - if it came to a choice between benevolence or expertise, what kind of person would a child trust?



Asheley Landrum and her colleagues first checked whether young children are able to prioritise relevant expertise. Forty-eight children aged between three and five years were introduced to a pair of male twins - one was an eagle expert, the other was a bicycle expert. Each expert stated the appropriate name for a series of obscure objects, some of which fell in their area of expertise, and the children had to say which name was correct. Three-year-olds struggled to favour names suggested by the relevant expert. Four- and five-year-olds showed a modest ability to prioritise the relevant expert's suggestions.



A follow-up study with more young children provided the crucial test of whether they'd be more trusting of kindness or expertise. This time the same two experts were either nice or nasty, as conveyed by their body language, facial expression and tone of voice. Benevolence and expertise were counterbalanced so sometimes the eagle expert was nice, sometimes the bike expert. The children showed a clear overall bias for believing the suggestions of the nicer person (70 per cent overall). They only showed a preference for listening to the man with relevant expertise if he was also nice.



A third and final study was similar but this time the researchers set up a choice between a nice or nasty relevant expert, and a nice or nasty second man who was described explicitly as lacking any relevant expertise. This was to make sure that the children weren't assuming that a nice expert could have knowledge beyond his stated field. Once again the children were swayed by niceness and this time paid even less attention to expertise (i.e. they chose the nice person's answers 62 per cent of the time, and this only rose to 65 per cent if he was also an expert).



Landrum and her colleagues proposed a few explanations for these results - perhaps young children use benevolence as a cue for trustworthiness or competence. Maybe they weren't thinking too hard and simply liked the nice man better, or disliked the nasty man, and this skewed their behaviour. Either way the researchers said this bias is "troubling" and could lead children "astray." They added: "Children may conclude that someone who appears nice is both trustworthy and competent, even if the friendly appearance is a carefully crafted act of manipulation."

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SOURCE:




BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/







Landrum AR, Mills CM, and Johnston AM (2013). When do children trust the expert? Benevolence information influences children's trust more than expertise. Developmental science, 16 (4), 622-38 PMID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23786479




Author weblink:http://www.utdallas.edu/research/thinklab/researchteam.html







Further reading. Toddlers won't bother learning from you if you're daft:http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/toddlers-wont-bother-learning-from-you.html

The perils of sitting down. Standing orders

Real science lies behind the fad for standing up at work

WINSTON CHURCHILL knew it. Ernest Hemingway knew it. Leonardo da Vinci knew it. Every trendy office from Silicon Valley to Scandinavia now knows it too: there is virtue in working standing up. And not merely standing. The trendiest offices of all have treadmill desks, which encourage people to walk while working. It sounds like a fad. But it does have a basis in science.

Sloth is rampant in the rich world. A typical car-driving, television-watching cubicle slave would have to walk an extra 19km a day to match the physical-activity levels of the few remaining people who still live as hunter-gatherers. Though all organisms tend to conserve energy when possible, evidence is building up that doing it to the extent most Westerners do is bad for you—so bad that it can kill you.

That, by itself, may not surprise. Health ministries have been nagging people for decades to do more exercise. What is surprising is that prolonged periods of inactivity are bad regardless of how much time you also spend on officially approved high-impact stuff like jogging or pounding treadmills in the gym. What you need instead, the latest research suggests, is constant low-level activity. This can be so low-level that you might not think of it as activity at all. Even just standing up counts, for it invokes muscles that sitting does not.

Researchers in this field trace the history of the idea that standing up is good for you back to 1953, when a study published in the Lancet found that bus conductors, who spend their days standing, had a risk of heart attack half that of bus drivers, who spend their shifts on their backsides. But as the health benefits of exercise and vigorous physical activity began to become clear in the 1970s, says David Dunstan, a researcher at the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, interest in the effects of low-intensity activity—like walking and standing—waned.

Arse longa, vita brevis

Over the past few years, however, interest has waxed again. A series of epidemiological studies, none big enough to be probative, but all pointing in the same direction, persuaded Emma Wilmot of the University of Leicester, in Britain, to carry out a meta-analysis. This is a technique that combines diverse studies in a statistically meaningful way. Dr Wilmot combined 18 of them, covering almost 800,000 people, in 2012 and concluded that those individuals who are least active in their normal daily lives are twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who are most active. She also found that the immobile are twice as likely to die from a heart attack and two-and-a-half times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease as the most ambulatory. Crucially, all this seemed independent of the amount of vigorous, gym-style exercise that volunteers did.

Correlation is not, of course, causation. But there is other evidence suggesting inactivity really is to blame for these problems. One exhibit is the finding that sitting down and attending to a task—anything from watching television to playing video games to reading—serves to increase the amount of calories people eat without increasing the quantity that they burn. Why that should be is unclear—as is whether low-level exercise like standing would deal with the snacking.

A different set of studies suggests that simple inactivity by itself—without any distractions like TV or reading—causes harm by altering the metabolism. One experiment, in which rats were immobilised for a day (not easy; the researchers had to suspend the animals’ hind legs to keep them still) found big falls in the amount of fats called triglycerides taken up by their skeletal muscles. This meant the triglycerides were available to cause trouble elsewhere. The rats’ levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) fell dramatically as well. HDL is a way of packaging cholesterol, and low levels of it promote heart disease. Other studies have shown the activity of lipoprotein lipase—an enzyme that regulates levels of triglycerides and HDL—drops sharply after just a few hours of inactivity, and that sloth is accompanied by changes in the activity levels of over 100 genes.

Papers which focus on people rather than laboratory animals have found similar effects. Happily, this research also suggests the changes can be reversed by small amounts of fairly relaxed activity. A study published last year by Dr Dunstan found that breaking up prolonged periods of sitting with two minutes of walking every 20 minutes made a big difference. After feeding his volunteers a sugary meal, he discovered that people who had been walking in this way had blood-glucose levels almost 30% lower than those of people who had remained seated.

For some scientists, this combination of epidemiology, animal experiments and human trials suggests that light-to-moderate exercise—standing up, walking around and the like—is something qualitatively different from an energetic, high-intensity workout. But not everyone is convinced. Many of the human studies are small-scale. (Dr Dunstan’s paper, for example, involved just 19 participants.) And not every study that has gone looking for the ill effects of inactivity has found them.

Still, the potential size of the problem means not everyone is prepared to wait for definitive proof. Sellers of standing desks are, naturally, jumping on the latest research findings to advertise their wares. And it is surely only a matter of time before the first law suit from a sickly cubicle slave reaches court.

SOURCE:

The Economist

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583239-real-science-lies-behind-fad-standing-up-work-standing-orders?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/pe/standingorders (accessed 11/08/13)

Το σαπούνι και το καθαρό νερό κάνουν τα παιδιά ψηλότερα

Προσθέτουν περίπου μισό εκατοστό στο ύψος τους μέχρι την ηλικία των 5 ετών.

Η χρήση καθαρού νερού και σαπουνιού δεν φέρνουν μόνο καλύτερη υγεία, αλλά ενθαρρύνουν και την ανάπτυξη των παιδιών, προσθέτοντας κατά μέσο όρο περίπου μισό εκατοστό στο ύψος τους μέχρι την ηλικία των πέντε ετών. Αυτό διαπίστωσε μια νέα βρετανική επιστημονική έρευνα, που ανέλυσε στοιχεία από πολλές χώρες, κυρίως αναπτυσσόμενες. Είναι η πρώτη φορά που γίνεται από επιστήμονες μια τόσο άμεση συσχέτιση ανάμεσα στις συνθήκες υγιεινής του σπιτιού και στο ύψος των παιδιών που βρίσκονται σε φάση ανάπτυξης.

Οι ερευνητές της Σχολής Υγιεινής και Τροπικής Ιατρικής του Λονδίνου, με επικεφαλής τον δρ. Άλαν Ντάνγκουρ, που -σε συνεργασία με τη διεθνή οργάνωση WaterAid- έκαναν τη σχετική δημοσίευση στην ιατρική επιθεώρηση «Cochrane Review», σύμφωνα με το BBC και τη βρετανική «Independent», μελέτησαν δεδομένα που αφορούσαν σχεδόν 10.000 παιδιά σε χώρες χαμηλού και μέσου εισοδήματος, όπως το Μπαγκλαντές, το Πακιστάν, η Αιθιοπία, η Νιγηρία, η Χιλή, η Ν. Αφρική, το Νεπάλ, η Κένυα, η Καμπότζη κ.α.

Η έρευνα ανέδειξε μια άλλη πιο αφανή πτυχή της σωστής υγιεινής, πέρα από την καταπολέμηση των ασθενειών και των πρόωρων θανάτων από διάφορες λοιμώξεις, καθώς δείχνει ότι η αδυναμία πρόσβασης σε καθαρό νερό και σε είδη υγιεινής (σαπούνι κλπ) αποτελούν ανασταλτικό παράγοντα για την ανάπτυξη και ειδικότερα για το ύψος του παιδιού, αν και όχι σε μεγάλο βαθμό.

Όπως δήλωσε ο Άλαν Ντάνγκουρ, πρώτη φορά αποδεικνύεται με στοιχεία πως όταν ένα παιδί πίνει βρώμικο νερό και δεν έχει σαπούνι να πλυθεί, τότε αμέσως μετά τη γέννησή του αρρωσταίνει κατ’ επανάληψη (διάρροια κ.α.), με συνέπεια να εμποδίζεται η σωστή ανάπτυξη του σώματός του. «Μισό εκατοστό (ύψους) παραπάνω μπορεί να μην ακούγεται πολύ, όμως, σύμφωνα με τις εκτιμήσεις μας, αυτό ισοδυναμεί με βελτίωση της ανάπτυξης σε ποσοστό περίπου 15%, που είναι αρκετά σημαντικό», πρόσθεσε ο Βρετανός ερευνητής.

Σύμφωνα με τον Παγκόσμιο Οργανισμό Υγείας, περίπου 165 εκατομμύρια παιδιά σε όλο τον κόσμο εκτιμάται ότι δεν παίρνουν το ύψος που θα μπορούσαν, εξαιτίας ανακοπής της ανάπτυξής τους κυρίως λόγω κακής σωματικής υγιεινής και υποσιτισμού (η ανεπάρκεια της τροφής αποτελεί αιτία για 3,1 εκατ. θανάτους ετησίως, σχεδόν το 50% των συνολικών θανάτων των παιδιών κάτω των πέντε ετών).

Πηγή: AΠE-MΠΕ

Kathimerini.gr (accessed 3/8/13)

Does police contact increase or decrease the likelihood that youths will offend in the future?

One of the main arguments for having more police is that they act as a deterrent. With more officers on the street, more would-be criminals can be stopped and questioned; more wrong-doers can be arrested. But what if police contact actually has the effect of making it more likely that young people will offend in the future? Criminologists call this theory "labelling" based on the idea that police encounters catalyse in young people a criminal identity, encouraging association with their deviant peers and estranging them from mainstream society.

To test whether police contact acts as a deterrent or a catalyst for future offending Stephanie Wiley and Finn-Age Esbensen used data gathered over several years from seven US cities as part of the Gang Resistance Education and Training Program. Data were available for 2614 school children and teenagers (aged 9 to 15; 49 per cent were male) collected at baseline (time one), again six to nine months later (time two), and then again a year after that (time three).

The researchers used the survey data to identify the children and teens' "propensity" for offending at time one based on the demographic factors age, sex and race, as well as many other risk factors including impulsivity, risk seeking, school commitment, parental monitoring, unsupervised time with peers, substance use and more. Then they looked to see which of their participants had contact with the police by time two - including being stopped for questioning (14 per cent were) or arrested (6 per cent).

The key finding is that with participants matched for propensity, those who had contact with the police said at time three that they'd feel less guilt if they committed various offences from theft to violence; they expressed more agreement with various "neutralisation" scenarios (e.g. whether it's OK to lie to keep yourself out of trouble); they were more committed to their deviant peers (e.g. they planned to continue hanging out with friends who'd been arrested); and finally, they said they'd engaged in more offending behaviour, from skipping classes to taking drugs or being violent. This pattern of results differed little between being arrested or merely being stopped.

"The current study adds to the labelling versus deterrent debate by identifying the negative impact that not only arrest but also simply being stopped by the police has on delinquent behaviour and attitudes," the researchers said. "The use of propensity score matching reduces the likelihood that our results are being driven by preexisting differences, a problem that may plague much of the existing labelling research."

The researchers acknowledged that they can't know for sure that their propensity matching was water-tight. Perhaps there was something about the kids and teens who went on to offend that wasn't picked up by the baseline propensity matching, and perhaps it was these unknown factors, rather than police contact, that had a causal part both in their receiving police contact and their later offending and attitudes.

Wiley and Esbensen also acknowledged that police contact is often unavoidable if crimes are to be prevented. Their research suggests that such police contact needs to be handled with utmost care to avoid the apparently harmful effects documented here. Also, they said: "It is important that youth are not isolated after experiencing police contact, and family members, criminal justice actors , and the community should take steps to ensure that youths' prosocial bonds are not attenuated following police contact."

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SOURCE:

RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/

Author:

Stephanie A. Wiley, & Finn-Aage Esbensen (2013). The Effect of Police Contact: Does Official Intervention Result in Deviance Amplification? Crime and delinquency DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0011128713492496

Author weblink: http://www.umsl.edu/ccj/Graduate%20Students/wiley.html