Take a couple of small infants, a nutty professor and a bunch of his colleagues, some cartoons and a TV set and what do you get? Well a psychological experiment.Lotte Thomsen,who is assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Psychology and his research fellow in Harvard's Department of Psychology, is the lead author of the article "Big and Mighty: Preverbal Infants Mentally Represent Social Dominance."
According to Thomsen's research, this potentially instinctive knowledge in infants could indicate the fact that we are all born with an understanding of the social hierarchy and how physical size relates to social dominance. Logic right?
Interviewing infants Thomsen and colleagues studied the reactions of kids ranging from 8 to 16 months old as they watched videos of interactions between cartoon figures of various sizes. (I don't suppose they watched Popeye or Mighty Mouse,or Atom Ant did they ?)
"The trouble with working with pre-verbal (unable to speak yet) infants is that you cannot just interview them and ask them what they think. So instead you have to look at what they do. And one of the things we know is that infants,like adults,tend to look longer at something that surprises them", Thomsen explains.
To see if small children use size as a cue for social dominance, they were shown simple cartoons of a big and little block that meet in the middle of a stage and bump into each other. In one of the cartoons the big block basically defeats the smaller block, and in the second one the opposite occurs.
The reactions that the scientists followed were the time these infants would watch the TV screen after the "bump" occurred. As they anticipated the times when the smaller block would win were the times the children watched more.
Awesome :D
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