Young children with autism are more trusting than other children

Young children with autism have difficultly deliberately deceiving other people, now a new study has shown that they are also more trusting than their neurotypical peers. These two characteristics may be related to the same underlying cause - namely, difficulty representing the mental states of others (known as "Theory of Mind"), although more research is needed to demonstrate this.

Li Yi and her colleagues tested 22 children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD; average age 7), 27 neurotypical age-matched controls, and 26 IQ-matched neurotypical controls (average age 6). The children chose which of three boxes to look in for the reward of a sticker. When an adult stranger first looked in the boxes and indicated which box the sticker would be found, nearly all the children with autism looked in that box. By contrast only just over half the age-matched and IQ-matched neurotypical controls did so.

In another condition, the children hid the sticker in one of the boxes while one of the researchers was out of the room. On returning, this researcher pointed to an incorrect box as the location of the sticker. Again, the children chose which box to look in for the reward. This time the children with autism, just like the neurotypical controls, nearly always looked in the correct box (where they themselves had placed the sticker). This shows that their trust is not unqualified. It is specifically when they lack knowledge themselves that they are more trusting of other people.

Yi and her team said "to the best of our knowledge, our findings are the first to report ASD children's trusting tendency during the early years." They advised that more research is needed to explore the reasons for autistic children's high levels of trust. Apart from problems with Theory of Mind, other possible reasons include a tendency to forget previous instances of adults lying; or conversely perhaps they tend to experience encounters with more trustworthy adults than neurotypical children do. Another avenue for future research, Yi's team said, is to look for ways to teach children with autism not to be excessively trusting.

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SOURCE:

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/ (accessed 28.10.13)

Yi L, Pan J, Fan Y, Zou X, Wang X, and Lee K (2013). Children with autism spectrum disorder are more trusting than typically developing children. Journal of experimental child psychology, 116 (3), 755-61 PMID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23810631

Author weblink: http://zjys.com.cn/conference/11.html

Seven-year-olds' beliefs about ability are associated with the way they were praised as toddlers

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Laboratory research pioneered by psychologist Carol Dweck has shown the short-term benefits of praising children for their efforts rather than their inherent traits. Doing so leads children to adopt a so-called "incremental mindset" - seeing ability as malleable and challenges as an opportunity to learn.

Now a new study co-authored by Dweck and led by Elizabeth Gunderson has made the first ever attempt to monitor how parents praise their young children in real-life situations, and to see how their style of praise is related to the children's mindset five years later.

The researchers observed and recorded 53 individual parents interacting with their children in the home for 90 minutes, whether playing, having a meal or whatever. They did this when the children were aged 14, 26 and 38 months. Five years later, the researchers caught up with the kids and asked them questions about their attitudes and mindset towards ability, challenges and moral goodness.

The key finding was the more parents tended to praise their pre-school age children for effort (known as process praise, as in "good job"), the more likely it was that those children had a "incremental attitude" towards intelligence and morality when they were aged seven to eight. This mindset was revealed by their seeing intelligence and moral attributes as malleable. For example, such children tended to agree that people can get smarter if they try harder, and disagree with the idea that a naughty child with always be naughty.

This association held even after the researchers controlled for a raft of other variables such as the families' socioeconomic status, the parents' own mindset towards ability, and total amount of parental praise.

"We present the first results indicating that the process praise children hear naturalistically bears a relation to their motivational frameworks that parallels the relation between process praise and motivational frameworks found experimentally," the researchers said.

Unlike parents' early use of process praise, there was no link between parents' early tendency to praise children for their traits (known as person praise, as in "you're so smart") and children's later ability mindset. This could be because the researchers actually observed very little person praise - it accounted for less than 10 per cent of praise-related utterances.

Although Gunderson and her colleagues acknowledged the limitations of their study - including the fact that it was observational and does not prove a causal link between parents' praise style and the children's later mindset - they said the results had important real-life implications. "In particular," they said, "praise that emphasises children's effort, actions, and strategies may not only predict but also impact and shape the development of children's motivational frameworks in the cognitive and social domains."

There were some other intriguing details. Parents who themselves held an incremental mindset towards ability actually tended to use more person praise with their children - perhaps, the researchers surmised, because they believed in the need to boost their children's self-esteem as a way to increase their ability.

Also, it was noteworthy that lab research in this area has tended to use praise that is explicitly process focused, as in "you must have tried hard." However, the researchers didn't uncover a single use of that phrase, and all forms of explicit process praise were hard to come by. This goes to show just how important it is to conduct observational research in real-life settings, to make sure that lab research is realistic.

Finally, the study revealed that parents tend to use more person praise with girls and more process praise with boys, echoing similar results in earlier research. In turn, later on, boys tended to express an incremental mindset more often than girls. This tallies with the picture painted in the developmental literature that girls more than boys attribute failure to lack of ability, especially in maths and science. This study raises the possibility that this could be due in part to the way they are praised at an early age.

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SOURCE:

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

Gunderson EA, Gripshover SJ, Romero C, Dweck CS, Goldin-Meadow S, and Levine SC (2013). Parent Praise to 1- to 3-Year-Olds Predicts Children's Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later. Child development, 84 (5), 1526-41 PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23397904

Author weblink: http://www.temple.edu/psychology/faculty/Gunderson.html

Further reading. Carole Sutton on a campaign to increase parents' praise of children (Jan 2012 Psychologist magazine):

http://tinyurl.com/pjaeu8e

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