10.2 Infancy and Childhood: Becoming a Person

Infancy is the stage of development that begins at birth and lasts between 18 and 24 months. Although infants seem to be capable of little more than squalling and squirming, research shows that they are much more sophisticated than they appear.

infancy

The stage of development that begins at birth and lasts between 18 and 24 months.

318

Perceptual and motor Development

Infants mimic the facial expressions of adults—and vice versa, of course!
tonphotographe.com/Shutterstock

What do newborns see?

New parents like to stand around the crib and make goofy faces at the baby because they think the baby will be amused. What they don’t know is that newborns have a rather limited range of vision. The level of detail that a newborn can see at a distance of 20 feet is roughly equivalent to the level of detail that an adult can see at 600 feet (Banks & Salapatek, 1983), which is to say that they are missing out on a lot of the cribside shenanigans. On the other hand, when stimuli are 8 to 12 inches away (about the distance between a nursing infant’s eyes and its mother’s face), newborns can see pretty well. How do we know? In one study, newborns were shown a circle with diagonal stripes over and over again. The infants stared a lot at first and then less and less on each subsequent presentation. Recall from the Learning chapter that habituation is the tendency for organisms to respond less intensely to a stimulus the more frequently they are exposed to it, and infants habituate just like the rest of us do. But when the researchers rotated the circle 90°, the newborns once again stared intently, indicating that they had noticed the change in the circle’s orientation (Slater, Morison, & Somers, 1988).

Newborns are especially attentive to social stimuli. For example, in one study, researchers stood close to some newborns while sticking out their tongues and stood close to other newborns while pursing their lips. Newborns in the first group stuck out their own tongues more often than those in the second group did, and newborns in the second group pursed their lips more often than those in the first group did (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). Indeed, newborns have been shown to mimic facial expressions in their very first hour of life (Reissland, 1988) and to mimic speech sounds as early as 12 weeks (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1996).

Although infants can use their eyes right away, they must spend considerably more time learning how to use their other parts. Motor development is the emergence of the ability to execute physical actions such as reaching, grasping, crawling, and walking. Motor behavior starts with a small set of reflexes, which are specific patterns of motor response that are triggered by specific patterns of sensory stimulation. For example, the rooting reflex is the tendency for infants to move their mouths toward any object that touches their cheek, and the sucking reflex is the tendency to suck any object that enters their mouths. These two reflexes allow newborns to find their mother’s nipple and begin feeding—a behavior so vitally important that nature took no chances and hardwired it into every one of us. Interestingly, these and other reflexes that are present at birth seem to disappear in the first few months.

motor development

The emergence of the ability to execute physical action.

reflexes

Specific patterns of motor response that are triggered by specific patterns of sensory stimulation.

Why are infants born with reflexes?

Motor behaviors develop through practice, which infants get a lot of! In just 1 hour in a playroom, the average infant takes 2,368 steps, travels 0.4 miles, and falls 17 times (Adolph et al., 2012).
Kayte Deioma/Photo Edit

In what order do infants learn to use parts of their bodies?

The development of more sophisticated motor behavior tends to obey two general rules. The first is the cephalocaudal rule (or the “top-to-bottom” rule), which describes the tendency for motor behavior to emerge in sequence from the head to the feet. Infants tend to gain control over their heads first, their arms and trunks next, and their legs last. A young infant who is placed on her stomach may lift her head and her chest by using her arms for support, but she typically has little control over her legs. The second rule is the proximodistal rule (or the “inside-to-outside” rule), which describes the tendency for motor behavior to emerge in sequence from the center to the periphery. Infants learn to control their trunks before their elbows and knees, which they learn to control before their hands and feet (see FIGURE 10.2). Motor behaviors generally emerge in an orderly sequence but not on a strict timetable. Rather, the timing of these behaviors is influenced by many factors, such as the infant’s incentive for reaching, body weight, muscular development, and general level of activity. In one study, infants who had visually stimulating mobiles hanging above their cribs began reaching for objects 6 weeks earlier than infants who did not (White & Held, 1966).

cephalocaudal rule

The “top-to-bottom” rule that describes the tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from the head to the feet.

proximodistal rule

The “inside-to-outside” rule that describes the tendency for motor behavior to emerge in sequence from the center to the periphery.

Figure 10.2: FIGURE 10.2 Motor Development Infants learn to control their bodies from head to feet and from center to periphery. These behaviors do not emerge on a strict timetable, but they do emerge in a strict sequence.

319

Cognitive Development

What are the three essential tasks of cognitive development?

In the first half of the 20th century, a Swiss biologist named Jean Piaget noticed that when asked certain kinds of questions (e.g., “Does the big glass have more liquid in it than the small glass? Can Billy see what you see?”), children of the same age gave the same wrong answers. And as they aged, they started giving the right answers at about the same time. This led Piaget to suggest that children move through discrete stages of cognitive development, which is the emergence of the ability to think and understand. Between infancy and adulthood, children must come to understand three important things: (a) how the world works, (b) how their minds represent that world, and (c) how other minds represent that world. Let’s see how children accomplish these three essential tasks.

cognitive development

The emergence of the ability to think and understand.

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Discovering the World

Piaget (1954) suggested that cognitive development occurs in four stages which he called the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal operational stage (see TABLE 10.1). The sensorimotor stage is a period of development that begins at birth and lasts through infancy. As its name suggests, infants at this stage are mainly busy using their ability to sense and their ability to move to acquire information about the world. By actively exploring their environments with their eyes, mouths, and fingers, infants begin to construct schemas, which are theories about of the way the world works.

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was the father of modern developmental psychology, as well as the last man to look good in a beret.
© Farrell Grehan/Corbis

What happens at the sensorimotor stage?

Table : Table 10.1 Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development

Stage

Characteristic

Sensorimotor (Birth–2 years)

Infant experiences world through movement and sense, develops schemas, begins to act intentionally, and shows evidence of understanding object permanence.

Preoperational (2–6 years)

Child acquires motor skills but does not understand conservation of physical properties. Child begins this stage of thinking egocentrically but ends with a basic understanding of other minds.

Concrete operational (6–11 years)

Child can think logically about physical objects and events and understands conservation of physical properties.

Formal operational (11 years and up)

Child can think logically about abstract propositions and hypotheticals.

sensorimotor stage

A stage of development that begins at birth and lasts through infancy.

schemas

Theories about the way the world works.

During the sensorimotor stage, infants explore with their hands and mouths, learning important lessons about the physical world such as, “If you whack Jell-O hard enough, you can actually wear it.”
© Michael Hagedorn/Corbis

As every scientist knows, the key advantage of having a theory is that it can be used to predict what will happen in novel situations. If an infant learns that tugging at a stuffed animal causes the toy to come closer, then that observation is incorporated into the infant’s theory about how physical objects behave when pulled, and the infant can later use that theory when he or she wants a different object to come closer, such as a rattle or a ball. Piaget called this assimilation, which is the process by which infants apply their schemas in novel situations. Of course, if the infant tugs the tail of the family cat, the cat is likely to sprint in the opposite direction. Because an infants’ theories about the world (“Things come closer if I pull them”) are occasionally disconfirmed, infants must occasionally adjust their schemas in light of new experiences (“Aha! Only inanimate things come closer when I pull them”). Piaget called this accommodation, which is the process by which infants revise their schemas to take new information into account.

assimilation

The process by which infants apply their schemas in novel situations.

accommodation

The process by which infants revise their schemas in light of new information.

Piaget suggested that infants lack some very basic understandings about the physical world and therefore must acquire them through experience. For example, when you put your shoes in the closet, you know that they exist even after you close the closet door, and you would be rather surprised if you opened the door a moment later and found the closet empty. But according to Piaget, this wouldn’t surprise an infant because infants do not have a theory of object permanence, which is the belief that objects exist even when they are not visible. But modern research suggests that infants may acquire a sense of object permanence much earlier than Piaget realized (Shinskey & Munakata, 2005).

object permanence

The belief that objects exist even when they are not visible.

When do children acquire a theory of object permanence?

For instance, in one study, infants were shown a miniature drawbridge that flipped up and down (see FIGURE 10.3). Once the infants got used to this, they watched as a box was placed behind the drawbridge—in its path but out of their sight. Some infants then saw a possible event: The drawbridge began to flip and then suddenly stopped, as if impeded by the box that the infants could not see. Other infants saw an impossible event: The drawbridge began to flip and then continued, as if unimpeded by the box. Four-month-old infants stared longer at the impossible event than at the possible event, suggesting that they were puzzled by it (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). The only thing that could have made it puzzling, of course, was the fact that the unseen box was not stopping the progress of the drawbridge (Fantz, 1964). Studies such as these suggest that infants may indeed have some understanding of object permanence by the time they are just 4 months old.

Figure 10.3: FIGURE 10.3 The Impossible Event (a) In the habituation trials, infants watched a drawbridge flip back and forth with nothing in its path until they grew bored. Then a box was placed behind the drawbridge and the infants were shown one of two events: In the possible event, the box kept the drawbridge from flipping all the way over; in the impossible event, it did not. (b) The graph shows the infants’ looking time during the habituation and the test trials. During the test trials, their interest was reawakened by the impossible event but not by the possible event (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). (Data from Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985.)

321

Hot Science: A Statistician in the Crib

A Statistician in the Crib

A magician asks you to shuffle a deck of cards and then name your favorite. Then he dons a blindfold, reaches out his hand, and pulls your favorite card from the deck. You are astonished—and the reason you are astonished is that you know that when a magician reaches into a deck of 52 cards, the odds that he will pick your favorite by sheer chance alone is rather small.

Would that trick astonish an infant? That’s pretty hard to imagine. After all, to appreciate the trick, one has to understand a basic rule of statistics—namely, that random samples look roughly like the populations from which they are drawn. But recent research (Denison, Reed, & Xu, 2013) suggests that infants as young as 24 weeks may understand just that.

In one study, researchers showed infants two boxes: One had mostly pink balls and just a few yellows; the other had mostly yellow balls with a few pinks. The infants then watched as an experimenter closed her eyes and reached into the mostly pink box, pulled out some balls, and deposited them in a little container in front of the infant. Sometimes she deposited four pinks and a yellow, and sometimes she deposited four yellows and a pink. What did the infants do?

When the experimenter pulled mainly pink balls from a mainly pink box, the infants glanced and then looked away. But when she pulled mainly yellow balls from a mainly pink box, they stared like bystanders at a train wreck. The fact that infants looked longer at the improbable sample than at the probable sample suggests that they found the former more astonishing; in other words, they had some basic understanding of how random sampling works.

This study—like so many in developmental psychology—teaches us that infants know a lot more than anyone could guess from casual observation of their behavior.

322

Discovering the Mind

When preoperational children are shown two equal-size glasses filled with equal amounts of liquid, they correctly say that neither glass “has more.” But when the contents of one glass are poured into a taller, thinner glass, they incorrectly say that the taller glass now “has more.” Concrete operational children don’t make this mistake because they recognize that operations such as pouring change the appearance of the liquid but not its actual volume.
Bianca Moscatelli/Worth Publishers

The long period following infancy is called childhood, which is the stage of development that begins at about 18 to 24 months and lasts until about 11 to 14 years. According to Piaget, children enter childhood at the preoperational stage, which is the stage of cognitive development that begins at about 2 years and ends at about 6 years, during which children develop a preliminary understanding of the physical world. They then pass through the concrete operational stage, which is the stage of cognitive development that begins at about 6 years and ends at about 11 years, during which children learn how actions or “operations” can transform the “concrete” objects of the physical world.

childhood

The stage of development that begins at about 18 to 24 months and lasts until about 11 or 14 years.

preoperational stage

The stage of cognitive development that begins at about 2 years and ends at about 6 years, during which children develop a preliminary understanding of the physical world.

concrete operational stage

The stage of cognitive development that begins at about 6 years and ends at about 11 years, during which children learn how actions or “operations” can transform the “concrete” objects of the physical world.

The difference between these stages is nicely illustrated by one of Piaget’s clever experiments in which he showed children a row of cups and asked them to place an egg in each. Preoperational children were able to do this, and afterward they readily agreed that there were just as many eggs as there were cups. Then Piaget removed the eggs and spread them out in a long line that extended beyond the row of cups. Preoperational children incorrectly claimed that there were now more eggs than cups, pointing out that the row of eggs was longer than the row of cups and hence there must be more of them. Concrete operational children, on the other hand, correctly reported that the number of eggs did not change when they were spread out in a longer line. They understood that quantity is a property of a set of concrete objects that does not change when an operation such as spreading out alters the set’s appearance (Piaget, 1954). Piaget called the child’s insight conservation, which is the notion that basic properties of an object do not change despite changes in the object’s appearance.

conservation

The notion that the quantitative properties of an object are invariant despite changes in the object’s appearance.

What distinguishes the preoperational and concrete operational stages?

The main reason why preoperational children do not fully grasp the notion of conservation is that they do not fully grasp the fact that they have minds and that these minds contain mental representations of the world. As adults, we naturally distinguish between appearances and realities. We realize that things aren’t always as they seem: A wagon can be red but look gray at dusk, and a highway can be dry but look wet in the heat. Visual illusions delight us precisely because we know that things look like this but are really like that. Preoperational children don’t make this distinction. When something looks gray or wet, they assume it is gray or wet.

But as children move from the preoperational to the concrete operational stage, they begin to realize that the way the world appears is not necessarily the way the world really is. For instance, concrete operational children can understand that when a ball of clay is rolled, stretched, or flattened, it is still the same amount of clay despite the fact that it looks larger in one form than in another. They can understand that when water is poured from a short, wide beaker into a tall, thin cylinder, it is still the same amount of water despite the fact that the water level in the cylinder is higher. Once children can make a distinction between objects and their mental representations of those objects, they begin to understand that certain operations—such as squishing, pouring, and spreading out—can change what an object looks like without changing what the object is like.

Once children are at the concrete operational stage, they can readily solve physical problems involving egg-spreading and clay squishing. They learn to solve nonphysical problems with equal ease at the formal operational stage, which is the final stage of cognitive development that begins around the age of 11, during which children learn to reason about abstract concepts. Childhood ends when formal operations begin, and people are able to reason systematically about abstract concepts such as liberty and love, about events that have not yet happened, and about events that might have happened but didn’t. The ability to generate, consider, reason about, or mentally “operate on” these abstract concepts, is the hallmark of formal operations.

formal operational stage

The final stage of cognitive development that begins around the age of 11, during which children learn to reason about abstract concepts.

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What is the essential feature of the formal operational stage?

Discovering Other Minds

As children develop, they discover their own minds, but they also discover the minds of others. Because preoperational children don’t fully grasp the fact that they have minds that mentally represent objects, they also don’t fully grasp the fact that other people have minds that often represent the same objects in different ways. As such, preoperational children generally expect others to see the world as they do. Egocentrism is the failure to understand that the world appears different to different people. Egocentrism is a hallmark of the preoperational stage, and it reveals itself in a variety of interesting ways. When 3-year-old children are asked what a person on the opposite side of a table is seeing, they typically claim that the other person sees what they see. They also think that others know what they know. For example, in a standard version of the false-belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), children see a puppet named Maxi deposit some chocolate in a cupboard and then leave the room. A second puppet arrives a moment later, finds the chocolate, and moves it to a different cupboard. The children are then asked where Maxi will look for the chocolate when he returns: in the first cupboard where he initially put it, or in the second cupboard where the children know it currently is? Most 5-year-olds realize that Maxi will search the first cupboard because Maxi did not see the chocolate being moved. But 3-year-olds typically claim that Maxi will look in the second cupboard, because the children know that this is where the chocolate really is. Children are able to provide the right answer to this question somewhere between the ages of 4 to 6 (Callaghan et al., 2005), and children in some cultures are able to do it earlier than children in others (Liu et al., 2008).

egocentrism

The failure to understand that the world appears different to different observers.

People who reach the formal operational stage can reason about abstract concepts such as freedom and justice. These two protesters are taking part in a demonstration in front of the White House, calling for the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

What does the false-belief task show?

Although very young children do not fully understand that others have different perceptions or beliefs than they do, they do seem to understand that others have different desires. For example, a 2-year-old who likes dogs can understand that other children don’t like dogs and can correctly predict that other children will avoid dogs that the child herself would approach. When 18-month-old toddlers see an adult express disgust while eating a food that the toddlers enjoy, they hand the adult a different food, as if they understand that different people have different tastes (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997).

When small children are told to hide, they sometimes cover their eyes. Because they can’t see you, they assume that you can’t see them (Russell, Gee, & Bullard, 2012).
Courtesy of Daniel Gilbert

Eventually, the vast majority of children come to understand that they and others have minds and that these minds represent the world in different ways. Once children understand these things, they are said to have acquired a theory of mind, which is the understanding that other people’s mental representations guide their behavior. The age at which children acquire a theory of mind appears to be influenced by a variety of factors, such as the number of siblings the child has, the frequency with which the child engages in pretend play, whether the child has an imaginary companion, and the socioeconomic status of the child’s family. But of all the factors researchers have studied, language seems to be the most important (Astington & Baird, 2005). Children’s language skills are an excellent predictor of how well they perform on false-belief tasks (Happé, 1995). Language—and especially language about thoughts and feelings—is an important tool for helping children make sense of their own and others’ minds (Harris, de Rosnay, & Pons, 2005).

theory of mind

The understanding that other people’s mental representations guide their behavior.

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Which children have special difficulty acquiring a theory of mind?

What did Piaget get wrong?

Michael Maslin/The New Yorker Collection/cartoonbank.com

Two groups of children lag far behind their peers in acquiring a theory of mind. Children with autism (a disorder we’ll cover in more depth in the Disorders chapter) typically have difficulty communicating with other people and making friends, and some psychologists have suggested that this is because they have trouble acquiring a theory of mind (Frith, 2003). Although children with autism are typically normal on most intellectual dimensions—and sometimes far better than normal—they have difficulty understanding the inner lives of other people (Dawson et al., 2007). They do not seem to understand that other people can have false beliefs (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Senju et al., 2009), and they have special trouble understanding belief-based emotions such as embarrassment and shame (Baron-Cohen, 1991; Heerey, Keltner, & Capps, 2003). The second group of children who lag behind their peers in acquiring a theory of mind consists of deaf children whose parents do not know sign language. These children are slow to learn to communicate because they do not have ready access to any form of conventional language, and this restriction seems to slow the development of their understanding of other minds. Like children with autism, they display difficulties in understanding false beliefs even at 5 or 6 years of age (DeVilliers, 2005; Peterson & Siegal, 1999). Just as learning a spoken language seems to help hearing children acquire a theory of mind, so does learning a sign language help deaf children do the same (Pyers & Senghas, 2009).

People with autism often have an unusual ability to concentrate on small details, words, and numbers for extended periods of time. Thorkil Sonne (right) started a company called Specialisterne.com, which places people with autism—like his son Lars (left)—at jobs that they can do better than more “neurotypical” people can.
Joachim Ladefoged/VII

Cognitive development is a complex journey, and Piaget’s ideas about it were nothing short of groundbreaking. Few psychologists have had such a profound impact on the field. Many of these ideas have held up quite well, but in the last few decades, psychologists have discovered two general ways in which Piaget got it wrong. First, Piaget thought that children graduated from one stage to another in the same way that they graduated from kindergarten to first grade: A child is in kindergarten or first grade, he is never in both, and there is an exact moment of transition to which everyone can point. Modern psychologists see development as more fluid and continuous—a less steplike progression than Piaget believed. Children who are transitioning between stages may perform more mature behaviors one day and less mature behaviors the next. Cognitive development is more like the change of seasons than it is like graduation. Second, children acquire many of the abilities that Piaget described much earlier than he realized (Gopnik, 2012). Every year, clever researchers find new ways of testing infants and children, and every year, textbook authors must lower the age at which cognitive milestones are achieved.

Development is not the steplike progression that Piaget imagined. Children who are transitioning between stages may act more mature one day and less mature the next.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock

325

Discovering Our Cultures

Piaget saw the child as a lone scientist who made observations, developed theories, and then revised those theories in light of new observations. And yet, most scientists don’t start from scratch. Rather, they receive training from more experienced scientists. According to Piaget’s contemporary, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, children do much the same thing. Vygotsky believed that cognitive development was largely the result of the child’s interaction with members of his or her own culture rather than his or her interaction with concrete objects (Vygotsky, 1978).

For example, in English, the names of numbers beyond 20 follow a logical pattern: twenty followed by a digit (twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, etc.). In Chinese, the numbers from 11 to 19 follow the same rule (ten-one, ten-two, ten-three …), but in English they do not (eleven, twelve, thirteen …). The difference in the regularity of these two systems makes a big difference to the children who must learn them. It is obvious to a Chinese-speaking child that 12 is 10+2 because the number is actually called “ten-two,” but this fact is not so obvious to an English-speaking child, who calls the number “twelve” (see FIGURE 10.4). In one study, children from many countries were asked to hand an experimenter a certain number of bricks. Some of the bricks were single, and some were glued together in strips of 10. When Asian children were asked to hand the experimenter 26 bricks, they tended to hand over 2 strips of 10 plus 6 singles. Non-Asian children tended to use the clumsier strategy of counting out 26 single bricks (Miura et al., 1994). Results such as these suggest that the regularity of the counting system that children inherit can promote or discourage their discovery of the fact that two-digit numbers can be broken down (Gordon, 2004; Imbo & LeFevre, 2009).

Figure 10.4: FIGURE 10.4 Twelve or Two-Teen? The arbitrary English “twelve” versus the logical Chinese “ten-two” puts children learning counting in English at a disadvantage. The percentage of American children who can count through the cardinal numbers drops off suddenly when they hit the number 11, whereas the percentage of Chinese children shows a more gradual decline (Miller, Smith, & Zhu, 1995). (Data from Miller, Smith, & Zhu, 1995.)

How does culture affect cognitive development?

Counting is just one of the many things that children learn from others. In fact, human beings are better than any other animal on earth at learning from other members of their own species, and that’s because they have three important skills that most other animals lack (Meltzoff et al., 2009; Striano & Reid, 2006).

  1. Joint attention is the ability to focus on what another person is focused on. If an adult turns her head to the left, both young infants (3 months) and older infants (9 months) will look to the left. But if the adult first closes her eyes and then looks to the left, the young infant will look to the left but the older infant will not (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002). This suggests that older infants are not just following the adult’s head movements, but are actually following her gaze—trying to see what they think she is seeing (see FIGURE 10.5).
  2. Imitation is the tendency to do what another person does or is trying to do. Infants naturally mimic adults (Jones, 2007), but very early on, they begin to mimic adults’ intentions rather than their actions per se. When an 18-month-old sees an adult’s hand slip as the adult tries to pull the lid off a jar, the infant won’t copy the slip, but will instead perform the intended action by removing the lid (Meltzoff, 1995, 2007).
  3. Social referencing is the ability to use another person’s reactions as information about the world (Kim, Walden, & Knieps, 2010; Walden & Ogan, 1988). As infants approach a new toy, they will often stop, look back, and examine their mother’s face for cues about whether she thinks the toy is or isn’t dangerous. (You’ll learn a lot more about how adults continue to use this skill when we discuss informational influence in the Social Psychology chapter).

Joint attention (“I see what you see”), imitation (“I do what you do”), and social referencing (“I think what you think”) are three of the basic abilities that allow infants to learn from other members of their species.

Figure 10.5: FIGURE 10.5 Joint Attention Joint attention allows children to learn from others. When a 12-month-old infant interacts with an adult (a) who then looks at an object (b), the infant will typically look at the same object (c) (Meltzo et al., 2009).
A.N. Meltzoff, P. K. Kuhl, J. Movellan, & T. J. Senjowski. “Foundations for a New Science of Learning.” Published in Science, 2009, vol. 325, July 17, pp. 284–288.
Children are not lone explorers who discover the world for themselves but members of families, communities, and societies that teach them much of what they need to know.
Daniel Gilbert

326

The Real World: Walk This Way

Walk This Way

Parents often complain that their children won’t take their advice. But research shows that even 18-month-old infants know when to listen to mom and dad—and when to ignore them.

Researchers (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2008) built an inclined plane whose steepness could be adjusted (as shown in the photo below), put some infants at the top and their moms at the bottom, and then watched to see whether the infants would attempt to walk down the plane and toward their mothers. Sometimes the plane was adjusted so that it was clearly flat and safe, sometimes it was adjusted so that it was clearly steep and risky, and sometimes it was adjusted somewhere between these two extremes. Mothers were instructed either to encourage their infants to walk down the plane or to discourage them from doing so.

So what did the infants do? Did they trust their mothers or did they trust their eyes? As you can see in the figure below, when the inclined plane was clearly safe or clearly risky, infants ignored their mothers. They typically trotted down the flat plane even when mom advised against it and refused to try the risky plane even when mom said it was okay. But when the plane was somewhere between safe and risky, the infants tended to follow mom’s advice.

These data show that infants use social information in a very sophisticated way. When their senses provide unambiguous information about the world, they ignore what people tell them. But when their senses leave them unsure about what to do, they readily accept parental advice. It appears that from the moment children start to walk, they know when to listen to their parents and when to shake their heads, roll their eyes, and do what they darn well please.

Courtesy of Karen Adolph Data from Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2008.

327

Social Development

Unlike baby turtles, baby humans cannot survive without their caregivers. But what exactly do caregivers provide? Some obvious answers are warmth, safety, and food—and those obvious answers are right. But caregivers also provide something that is far less obvious but every bit as essential to an infant’s development.

During World War II, psychologists studied infants who were living in orphanages while awaiting adoption. Although these children were warm, safe, and wellfed, many were developmentally impaired, both physically and psychologically (Spitz, 1949). A few years later, psychologist Harry Harlow (1958; Harlow & Harlow, 1965) discovered that infant rhesus monkeys that were warm, safe, and well fed but that were not allowed any social contact for the first 6 months of their lives developed a variety of behavioral abnormalities. They compulsively rocked back and forth while biting themselves, and if they were introduced to other monkeys, they avoided them entirely. These socially isolated monkeys turned out to be incapable of communicating with or learning from others of their kind, and when the females matured and became mothers, they ignored, rejected, and sometimes even attacked their own infants. Harlow also discovered that when socially isolated monkeys were put in a cage with two “artificial mothers”—one that was made of wire and dispensed food and one that was made of cloth and dispensed no food—they spent most of their time clinging to the soft cloth mother despite the fact that the wire mother was the source of their nourishment. Clearly, infants of both species require something more from their caregivers than mere sustenance. But what?

Becoming Attached

Few things are cuter than a string of ducklings following their mother. But how do they know who their mother is? In a series of studies, the biologist Konrad Lorenz discovered that ducklings don’t actually know who their mothers are at all. Rather, they simply follow the first moving object they see after they are born—even if that object is a tennis ball or a biologist! Lorenz theorized that nature designed ducklings so that the first moving object they saw was imprinted on their brains and became “the thing I must always stay near” (Lorenz, 1952).

Harlow’s monkeys preferred the comfort and warmth of a soft cloth mother (left) to the wire mother (right) even when the wire mother was associated with food.
Science Source Science Source

Psychiatrist John Bowlby was fascinated by Lorenz’s work, as well as by Harlow’s studies of rhesus monkeys reared in isolation and the work on children reared in orphanages, and he sought to understand how human infants form attachments to their caregivers (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980). Bowlby began by noting that from the moment they are born, ducks waddle after their mothers and monkeys cling to their mothers’ furry chests because the newborns of both species must stay close to their caregivers to survive. Human infants, he suggested, have a similar need, but because they are much less physically developed, they can’t waddle or cling. So instead they smile and cry. When an infant cries, gurgles, coos, makes eye contact, or smiles, most adults reflexively move toward the infant, and Bowlby suggested that this is why infants have been designed to emit these signals.

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Like hatchlings, human infants need to stay close to their mothers to survive. Unlike hatchlings, human infants know how to get their mothers to come to them rather than the other way around.
© John St. Germain/Alamy © Peter Burian/Corbis

According to Bowlby, infants initially send these signals to anyone within visual or auditory range. For the first 6 months or so, they keep a “mental tally” of who responds most promptly and often to their signals, and soon they begin to target the best and fastest responder, also known as the primary caregiver. This person quickly becomes the emotional center of the infant’s universe. Infants feel secure in the primary caregiver’s presence and will happily crawl around, exploring their environments with their eyes, ears, fingers, and mouths. But if their primary caregiver gets too far away, infants begin to feel insecure, and they take action to decrease the distance between themselves and their primary caregiver, perhaps by crawling toward their caregiver or perhaps by crying until their caregiver moves toward them. Human infants, Bowlby suggested, are predisposed to form an attachment—that is, an emotional bond with a primary caregiver.

attachment

An emotional bond with a primary caregiver.

How does an infant “decide” to whom he or she should become attached?

Attachment Styles

Of course, not all emotional bonds are of the same kind. Research suggests that most infants show one of four basic patterns of attachment, known as attachment styles (Ainsworth et al., 1978), which can be inferred by watching how they respond when their caregivers leave them alone for a few minutes and then return:

  1. Secure attachment. When the caregiver leaves, secure infants may or may not be distressed. When she returns, the distressed infants go to her and are calmed by her presence, while non-distressed infants acknowledge her with a glance or greeting.
  2. Avoidant attachment. When the caregiver leaves, avoidant infants are not distressed, but when she returns, they don’t acknowledge her.
  3. Ambivalent attachment. When the caregiver leaves, ambivalent infants are distressed, and when she returns, they rebuff her, refusing any attempt at calming while arching their backs and squirming to get away.
  4. Disorganized attachment. When their caregiver leaves and returns, disorganized infants show no consistent pattern of response.

Where do these attachment styles come from? Childrens’ attachment styles are determined in part by their temperament, or characteristic pattern of emotional reactivity (Thomas & Chess, 1977). Whether measured by parents’ reports or by physiological indices such as heart rate or cerebral blood flow, very young children vary in their tendency toward fearfulness, irritability, activity, positive affect, and other emotional traits (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). These temperamental differences among infants appear to result partly from innate biological differences (Baker et al., 2013). But culture also plays a role in determining attachment style. For example, although the secure attachment style is the most common one among infants of all cultures (van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988), German children (whose parents tend to foster independence) are more likely to have avoidant than ambivalent attachment styles, and Japanese children (whose mothers typically stay home and do not leave them in the care of others) are more likely to have ambivalent than avoidant attachment styles (Takahashi, 1986).

temperaments

Characteristic patterns of emotional reactivity.

Children are naturally social creatures who readily develop relationships with caregivers and peers. Toddlers who spend time with a responsive robot will begin to treat it like a classmate instead of like a toy (Tanaka, Cicourel, & Movellan, 2007).
Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images

Although biology and culture both play a role, for the most part a child’s attachment style is determined by interactions with his or her primary caregiver. Studies have shown that mothers of securely attached infants tend to be especially sensitive to signs of their child’s emotional state, especially good at detecting their infant’s “request” for reassurance, and especially responsive to that request (Ainsworth et al., 1978; De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997). In contrast, mothers of infants with an ambivalent attachment style tend to respond inconsistently, only sometimes attending to infants who are showing signs of distress.

How do caregivers influence an infant’s attachment style?

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As a result of their interactions with their caregivers, infants develop an internal working model of relationships, which is a set of beliefs about the self, the primary caregiver, and the relationship between them (Bretherton & Munholland, 1999). Secure infants seem certain that their primary caregiver will respond when they feel distressed; avoidant infants seem certain that their primary caregiver will not respond when they are distressed; and ambivalent infants seem uncertain about whether their primary caregiver will respond. Infants with a disorganized attachment style seem to be confused about their caregivers, which has led some psychologists to speculate that this style primarily characterizes children who have been abused (Carolson, 1998; Cicchetti & Toth, 1998).

internal working model of relationships

A set of beliefs about the self, the primary caregiver, and the relationship between them.

Does spending time in day care impair the attachment process? A long-term study showed that attachment style is strongly influenced by maternal sensitivity and responsiveness, but not by the quality, amount, stability, or type of day care (Friedman & Boyle, 2008).
David Grossman/Alamy

Differences in how caregivers respond are largely due to differences in their ability to read their infants’ emotional states. Mothers who think of their infants as unique individuals with emotional lives and not just as creatures with urgent physical needs are more likely to have securely attached infants (Meins, 2003; Meins et al., 2001)? It appears so. Mothers whose infants were particularly irritable and difficult participated in a training program designed to sensitize them to their infants’ emotional signals and to encourage them to be more responsive to their infants. A year or two later, those infants whose mothers had received the training were considerably more likely to have a secure attachment style than were those whose mothers did not receive the training (van den Boom, 1994, 1995).

This is potentially good news, because children and adults who were securely attached as infants have greater psychological well-being (Madigan et al., 2013) higher academic achievement (Jacobson & Hoffman, 1997), and better social relationships (McElwain, Booth-LaForce, & Wu, 2011; Schneider, Atkinson, & Tardif, 2001; Simpson, Collins, & Salvatore, 2011; Steele et al., 1999; Vondra et al., 2001). Some psychologists suggest that this is because people apply the working models they developed as infants to their later relationships with teachers, friends, and lovers (Sroufe, Egeland, & Kruetzer, 1990). But other psychologists argue that an infant’s attachment style is correlated with later outcomes only because both the style and the outcome are caused by the same environment: In other words, sensitive and responsive caregivers cause both the infant’s attachment style and his or her later adult outcomes (Lamb et al., 1985).

Moral Development

From the moment of birth, human beings can make one distinction quickly and well, and that’s the distinction between pleasure and pain. Before they hit their very first diapers, infants can tell when something feels good or bad, and they can demonstrate to anyone within earshot that they strongly prefer the former. Over the next few years, they begin to notice that their pleasures (“Throwing food is fun”) are often someone else’s pains (“Throwing food makes Mom mad”), which is a bit of a problem because infants need these other people (and especially their caregivers) to survive. So they start to learn how to balance their needs and the needs of those around them, and they do this in part by developing the distinction between right and wrong.

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Knowing What’s Right

How do children think about right and wrong? Piaget identified three ways in which children’s moral thinking shifts as they grow and develop (Piaget, 1932/1965).

According to Piaget, what three shifts characterize moral development?

  1. First, Piaget noticed that children’s moral thinking tends to shift from realism to relativism. Very young children regard moral rules as real, inviolable truths about the world. For the young child, right and wrong are like day and night: They exist in the world and do not depend on what people think or say. That’s why young children generally don’t think that a bad action (such as hitting someone) can ever be good, even if everyone agreed to allow it. As they mature, children begin to realize that some moral rules (e.g., wives should obey their husbands) are inventions, not discoveries, and that people can therefore agree to adopt them, change them, or abandon them entirely.
  2. Second, Piaget noticed that children’s moral thinking tends to shift from prescriptions to principles. Young children think of moral rules as guidelines for specific actions in specific situations (“Everyone gets a turn playing with the iPad”). As they mature, children come to see that specific rules are expressions of more general principles, such as fairness and equity, which means that specific rules can be abandoned or modified when they fail to uphold the general principle (“If Jason missed his turn last time then he should get two turns now”).
  3. Third and finally, Piaget noticed that children’s moral thinking tends to shift from outcomes to intentions. For the young child, an unintentional action that causes great harm (“Josh accidentally broke Dad’s iPad”) seems “more wrong” than an intentional action that causes slight harm (“Josh got mad and broke Dad’s pencil”) because young children tend to judge the morality of an action by its outcome rather than by the actor’s intentions. As they mature, children begin to see that the morality of an action is critically dependent on the actor’s state of mind.
According to Piaget, young children do not realize that moral rules can vary across persons and cultures. For instance, most Americans think it is immoral to eat a dog, but most Vietnamese disagree.
Hoang Dihn Nam/AFP/Getty Images
During WWII, many Albanian Muslims shielded their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. Baba Haxhi Dede Reshatbardhi (pictured) was one of those who saved many Jewish lives.
© Godong/Robert Harding/Newscom

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg used Piaget’s insights to produce a more detailed theory of the development of moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1958, 1963, 1986). He based his theory on people’s responses to a series of dilemmas like this one:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. The druggist in town had recently discovered a new drug that might save her. The druggist was charging $2,000 a dose, even though it only cost him $200 to make. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, only had $1,000. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell the drug cheaper. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the drugstore to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have done that?

According to Kohlberg, people’s answers to this question reveal that moral reasoning develops in three stages:

  1. Most children are at the preconventional stage, which is a stage of moral development in which the morality of an action is primarily determined by its consequences for the actor. Immoral actions are simply those for which one is punished. For example, children at this stage often base their moral judgment of Heinz on the relative costs of one decision (“He would feel bad if he went to jail”) and another (“But he’d feel even worse if his wife died, so he should steal the medicine”).

    preconventional stage

    A stage of moral development in which the morality of an action is primarily determined by its consequences for the actor.

  2. Somewhere around adolescence, most people move to the conventional stage, which is a stage of moral development in which the morality of an action is primarily determined by the extent to which it conforms to social rules. Immoral actions are those for which one is condemned by others. People at this stage argue that Heinz must weigh his duty to society, which suggests he should obey the law, against his duty to his family, which suggests he should break it.

    conventional stage

    A stage of moral development in which the morality of an action is primarily determined by the extent to which it conforms to social rules.

  3. Finally, most adults move to the postconventional stage, which is a stage of moral development in which the morality of an action is determined by a set of general principles that reflect core values, such as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When a behavior violates these principles, it is immoral, and if a law requires these principles to be violated, then it should be disobeyed. For a person who has reached the postconventional stage, a woman’s life is always more important than a shopkeeper’s profits, and so stealing the drug is not only a moral behavior, but also a moral obligation.

    postconventional stage

    A stage of moral development at which the morality of an action is determined by a set of general principles that reflect core values.

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What was Kohlberg right about and wrong about?

W. B. Park/Cartoonstock

Research supports Kohlberg’s general claim that moral reasoning shifts from an emphasis on punishment to an emphasis on social rules and finally to an emphasis on ethical principles (Walker, 1988). But research also suggests that these stages are not quite as discrete as Kohlberg thought. For instance, a single person may use preconventional, conventional, and postconventional thinking in different circumstances, which suggests that the developing person does not “reach a stage” so much as “acquires a skill” that may or may not be used on a particular occasion. Others have criticized Kohlberg’s theory on the grounds that it doesn’t apply well to non-Westerners (Simpson, 1974). For example, some non-Western societies value obedience and community over liberty and individuality; thus, the moral reasoning of people in those societies may appear to reflect a conventional devotion to social norms when it actually reflects a postconventional consideration of ethical principles.

Feeling What’s Right

Research on moral reasoning suggests that people are like judges in a court of law, using rational analysis—sometimes simple and sometimes sophisticated—to distinguish between right and wrong. But moral dilemmas don’t just make us think; they also make us feel. Consider this one:

You are standing on a bridge. Below you see a runaway trolley hurtling down the track toward five people who will be killed if it remains on its present course. You can save these people by flipping a lever that will switch the trolley onto a different track, where it will kill just one person instead of five. Is it morally permissible to divert the trolley and prevent five deaths at the cost of one?

Now consider a slightly different version of this problem:

You and a large man are standing on a bridge. Below you see a runaway trolley hurtling down the track toward five people who will be killed if it remains on its present course. You can save these people by pushing the large man onto the track, where his body will be caught up in the trolley’s wheels and stop it before it kills the five people. Is it morally permissible to push the large man and prevent five deaths at the cost of one?

These scenarios are illustrated in FIGURE 10.6. If you are like most people, you are more likely to think it is morally permissible to pull a switch than to push a man (Greene et al., 2001). And yet, both cases involve killing one person to save five, so how did your moral reasoning lead you to reach such different conclusions? The answer is that you probably didn’t reach these conclusions by moral reasoning at all. Rather, you simply had a strong negative emotional reaction to the thought of pushing another human being into the path of an oncoming trolley and watching him get sliced and diced, and that emotional reaction instantly led you to conclude that pushing him must be wrong. Sure, you came up with a few good arguments to support this conclusion (“What if he turned around and bit me?” or “I’d hate to get spleen all over my new shoes”), but those arguments probably followed your conclusion rather than preceding it (Greene, 2013).

Figure 10.6: FIGURE 10.6 The Trolley Problem Why does it seem permissible to trade one life for five lives by pulling a switch but not by pushing a man from a bridge? Research suggests that the scenario shown in (b) elicits a more negative emotional response than does the scenario shown in (a), and this emotional response may be the basis for our moral intuitions.

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Do moral judgments come before or after emotional reactions?

Most people are upset by the suffering of others, and research suggests that even young children have this response, which may be the basis of their emerging morality.
Creasource/Corbis

The way people respond to cases such as these has convinced some psychologists that moral judgments are the consequences—and not the causes—of emotional reactions (Haidt, 2001). According to this moral intuitionist perspective, we have evolved to react emotionally to a small family of events that are particularly relevant to reproduction and survival, and we have developed the distinction between right and wrong as a way of labeling and explaining these emotional reactions (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). Some research supports this view. For example, in one study (Wheatley & Haidt, 2005), participants were hypnotized and told that whenever they heard the word take, they would experience “a brief pang of disgust … a sickening feeling in your stomach.” After they came out of the hypnotic state, the participants were asked to rate the morality of several actions. Sometimes the description of the action contained the word take (“How immoral is it for a police officer to take a bribe”) and sometimes it did not (“How immoral is it for a police officer to accept a bribe?”). Participants rated the action as less moral when it contained the word take, suggesting that their negative feelings were causing—rather than being caused by—their moral reasoning.

What happens when we see others suffer?

The moral intuitionist perspective suggests that we consider it immoral to push someone onto the tracks simply because the idea of watching someone suffer makes us feel bad (Greene et al., 2001). In fact, research has shown that watching someone suffer activates many of the same brain regions that are activated when we suffer ourselves (Carr et al., 2003; see the discussion of mirror neurons in the Neuroscience and Behavior chapter). In one study, women received a shock or watched their romantic partners receive a shock on different parts of their bodies. The regions of the women’s brains that processed information about the location of the shock were activated only when the women experienced the shock themselves, but the regions that processed emotional information were activated whether the women received the shock or observed it (Singer et al., 2004). The fact that we can actually feel another person’s suffering may explain why even a small child who is incapable of sophisticated moral reasoning still considers it wrong when someone hurts someone else, especially when the person being hurt is similar to the child (Hamlin et al., 2013). Indeed, even very young children say that hitting is wrong even when an adult instructs someone to do it (Laupa & Turiel, 1986). It appears that from a very early age, other people’s suffering can become our suffering, and this leads us to conclude that the actions that caused the suffering are immoral.

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SUMMARY QUIZ [10.2]

Question 10.4

1. Piaget believed that infants construct ______, which are theories about the way the world works.
  1. assimilations
  2. accommodations
  3. schemas
  4. habituations

c.

Question 10.5

2. Once children understand that human behavior is guided by mental representations, they are said to have acquired
  1. joint attention.
  2. a theory of mind.
  3. formal operational ability.
  4. egocentrism.

b.

Question 10.6

3. When infants in a new situation examine their mother’s face for cues about what to do, they are demonstrating an ability known as
  1. joint attention.
  2. social referencing.
  3. imitation.
  4. all of the above.

b.

Question 10.7

4. The capacity for attachment may be innate, but the quality of attachment is influenced by
  1. the child’s temperament.
  2. the ability of primary caregivers to read their child’s emotional state.
  3. the interaction between the child and the primary caregiver.
  4. all of the above.

d.