Random news from the Archive Adults evaluate children according to words
29.02.2016
Often in a conversation about children, you can hear that some boy or girl has a smart face or smart eyes (well, or not smart, but vice versa). On the other hand, it is just as common to hear that someone's son or daughter is developed beyond his years. But how do we assess how developed a child is? It seems self-evident that adults evaluate children by their appearance, by facial expressions: after all, children are not adults, and they cannot yet express their personality in words and deeds. However, in reality, appearance is not the main thing, and we believe more in what the child says than in how he looks.
Psychologists from Florida Atlantic University set up an experiment in which adults were shown several photographs of six-year-old children, boys and girls. Some photos were artificially "grown up" - so that the child looked not at 6, but at 8-10 years old, while other photos, on the contrary, underwent "rejuvenation" - the children looked 4-5 years old. The photographs were accompanied by children's thoughts-statements, which were supposed to help adults determine the psychological portrait of the child. For example, the phrase "the sun won't come out tomorrow because it's (at something) angry" obviously spoke of the immaturity, "childishness" of a child who still lives to a very large extent in his fantasies. That is, the descriptions indicated how boys and girls are oriented in the world, how intellectually developed, etc.
Combinations of words and photos were offered in a variety of ways: sometimes only a photo was shown, sometimes words were attached to the photo that "by age" did not match the photo (that is, in the photo the child, when compared with his own words, was younger or older), and sometimes a portrait photographic and verbal portrait coincided.
Adults, in the end, made their own psychological verdict: they had to say whether the child liked to lie, whether he was quick-witted, whether he was friendly, affable or not. Psychologists, in turn, concluded how an adult sees a child - as still small or as already large. As a result, it turned out that children were evaluated mainly by what and how they said.
For example, when a participant in the experiment (be it a man or a woman - gender did not play a role) described his impression of a child who "said" about the "angry sun", then he perceived him as a little one, no matter how old the boy was ( or a girl - here the floor also played almost no role) looked in the photo. Moreover, it was “very childish” thoughts that had the greatest power, that is, having heard some strange fantasy, an adult was more likely to underestimate the child’s age than, on the contrary, add years to him if he suddenly said something smart.
It must be emphasized that we are talking only about a certain age, from 4 to 10. At earlier times, we evaluate child development mostly in appearance - how plump the cheeks are, how round the eyes are, and so on. But then the children fully master speech, the school is already shining for them, the world is getting bigger for them, social interactions are becoming more complicated - and here, in order to understand how adequate the child is to the world, one cannot do without words.
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