Tigers and Authority

Well ! Valentine's day has come and gone for another year but it shrank into insignificance with the news that today was also the Chinese New Year ! So a little 新年快乐 into this year of the Tiger which is my mum's sign so an extra good year in store for her !


Happy New Year to all the tigers out there !

Today, most of my day was spent writing an essay on object permanence and more specifically the A-not-B task which basically consists with an infant being presented with a toy which disappears into a well during several times. The kid is normally very confused at this point as to why it is here but we don't take that into account. We then put the toy in a second well and see if the infant goes for the first or second well. Younger infants (5-7 months) tend to go for the first well due to habituation, or maybe a damaged frontal lobe, or maybe due to attention inhibition, or maybe due to external factors such as poverty... But seeing as we are psychologists, we'll never agree so it's all a nice never-ending debate ! Older infants (8 months onwards) tend to go for the second well where the toy was last put due to their flawless object permanence that has developed and then everyone's happy. I concluded that many different aspects can cause failure in the task:

"To conclude, many theories are brought forward about why a child could possibly be less successful than another when carrying out the A-Not-B task and most vie for the position of best theory but it is my belief that several factors can lead to this, be they cognitive, neurophysiological or environmental, and that research supporting these theories prove that there is more than just one way to an erroneous result."

Fun times all round.

Now to lighten up the mood, some amusing pictures from the internet

Nice

The other day, I watched what is now one of my favorite films "Die Welle", or "The Wave" which I talked about a few days ago. What I didn't know, is that this actually happened in real life, in California, 1967. Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave.

This was carried out by a history teacher but has had many psychological implications about how we can ALL sucumb to authority however much we may deny it. A bit like Milgram's study where virtually all participants delivered fatal doses of electricity to a person when asked by a person in authority (the person wasn't being shocked, s/he was a confederate). Still, we psychologists thought we could go one better and test Primary School Children ! Wahey ! You've got to love psychology before the ethics era we live in now. They basically got children in a class to be told that those with Brown eyes were better than those with Blue eyes which lead to classwide persecution and ostracising of blue-eyed children. The teacher then went to explain that she was wrong and it was in fact the blue-eyed children who were superior which led to a complete reversal of scenario with brown-eyed children being belittled. Then they were all told it was an experiement and that eye colour in fact hasn't got an effect on your persona.

More reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

Imagine carrying out a similar study nowadays ?! You'd get lynched by parents which is why some crucial aspects of psychology to do with stress and similar can now never be discovered due to ethical constraints... Unless you go to the Belgian Congo or something but then cross-cultural differences come into play and no-one's happy.

I've spoken to much ! I need sleep for a long, long week ahead !!

G'night ! Bonne Nuit !