Even a four-year-old can tell when you're contradicting yourself (and now they won't trust you)

"Yes Victoria, eating chocolate is unhealthy, but not when I eat it" – you might wonder just how long you can get away this kind of contradictory logic with your kids. If you'd asked Jean Piaget, one of the founding fathers of child psychology, he would probably have told you that you'll be fine until they're at least eight. After all, he'd observed that children younger than this age often describe things in contradictory ways, such as saying that a candle sinks because it's round, but that a ball floats because it's round.Recent research has largely backed up Piaget's view, but in a new study in Child Development, psychologists have shown that children's recognition of logical inconsistency starts much earlier – around four years of age – when they are exposed to it in a conversational context. This makes sense, say Sabine Doebel and her colleagues, because reasoning probably evolved as a way to evaluate what we're told by others – an especially important skill for children. A first experiment with 74 children aged three to five involved them watching video clips of one woman asking two others a series of basic questions, like "Can you tell me about the ball you saw today?". One woman answered all the questions in a contradictory way ("Today I saw a ball that was the biggest ball ever and it was the smallest ball ever") whereas the other woman answered the questions in a logically consistent way ("Today I saw a ball that was the biggest ball ever and it was the soft...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Source Type: blogs