Cognitive “babyness”: Developmental differences in the power of young children's supernatural thinking to influence positive and negative affect.

Abstract

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Cognitive Cues are More Compelling than Facial Cues in Determining Adults' Reactions towards Young Children

“…In contrast, the expression of different types of immature natural thinking by children, as exemplified by phenomena such as overestimating of one's abilities, failure to inhibit a behavior, or understanding some aspects of theory of mind, would be simply perceived by adults as "poor thinking" and would elicit a negative rather than a positive reaction. Periss et al (2012) also suggested that the finding that older adolescents, but not younger adolescents, displayed the same pattern of responding as adults is consistent with the idea that "cognitive babyness" may reflect an adaptation for people anticipating the possible role of parenthood.…”

“…For the Consistent condition, we hypothesized that the pattern of results would be similar (and perhaps even exaggerated) to the pattern found for the Vignettes-Only condition in previous research (Bjorklund et al, 2010;Periss et al, 2012). That is, we predicted that for the supernatural vignettes, participants would select the immaturelooking child expressing immature cognition more frequently than the mature-looking child expressing mature cognition for the positive-affect and helpless traits.…”

“…For the Mature-Face and Immature-Face conditions, we predicted that the patterns would be similar to those of participants given only vignettes (Bjorklund et al, 2010;Periss et al, 2012) and to those proposed for participants in the Consistent condition, although possibly not as strong.…”

“…The general methodology followed that of Bjorklund et al (2010) and Periss et al (2012). Participants were presented with pairs of photographs of children's faces paired with vignettes attributed to children (one group received faces only, without the vignettes).…”

“…Some authors (e.g., Bogin, 2006;Nielsen, 2012) have Hernández Blasi, and Periss, 2010;Periss, Hernández Blasi, and Bjorklund, 2012), in which adults in the United States and Spain, parents and nonparents, and men and women attributed more positive qualities (e.g., cute, friendly, feel like helping) and fewer negative qualities (e.g., sneaky, likely to lie, feel more angry with) to children who expressed some forms of immature cognition. In these studies, participants read two brief vignettes attributed to two hypothetical children and selected which of the two children better reflected a series of 14 adjectives or brief statements, organized into four categories: positive affect (e.g., cute, friendly), negative affect (e.g., sneaky, likely to lie), helpless, and intelligence.…”