Are you smarter than a 6 month old?
by Miki SaxonWe choose whom to hire/follow/marry/date/befriend—or not.
Some of those choices work out and some don’t, but it’s when we choose someone who’s flawed, who just isn’t nice, that often bothers us the most. How could we have missed it—it always seems so obvious after the fact—and we end up wondering why our social judgment is so faulty.
It doesn’t help that new research is showing that you don’t need to be Santa to tell the difference between naughty and nice, even infants can spot it.
Babies as young as 6 to 10 months old showed crucial social judging skills before they could talk, according to a study by researchers at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center published in Thursday’s journal Nature…the Yale team has other preliminary research that shows similar responses even in 3-month-olds.
Ouch.
So what happens between 6 months and the future? Why do we hire/follow/marry/date/befriend the oh-so-obviously wrong people? Why do we make so many poor choices?
What do you think?
December 1st, 2007 at 2:35 pm
I think that we all secretly think we can fix other people. You know, “this guy would be perfect if only…”
December 1st, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I think we don’t want to see faults…we want to see the best in people. Also, like Kelly says, we think they’ll change.
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Kelly, Good point! We’ve all been there on every level across our lives.
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Mary Emma, I’m not sure if it’s that we don’t want to see faults as much as we see/hear whatever we want to, whether good or bad, and just tune out the rest.
December 3rd, 2007 at 3:46 am
I agree about children’s judgment. The only time it doesn’t work is when they’re being offered candy. They’d think Hitler was a good guy as long as he was holding out a fistful of candies to them.
I think what happens as we get older is that we become distracted by more things than candy ($, sex, prestige, power, etc) and hence it’s easier to ruin our judgement.
That’s my theory anyhoo.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:16 am
I think we make poor decisions because we just don’t “think it through”. We always want to get to the end straight from the beginning without considering all of the pieces.
December 4th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Pete, Your theory is certainly plausible and converges with Bridget’s that we just don’t think it through.
But I’m wondering if when we lose our baby brain cells and grow our adult ones that capability is just lost. What do you think?
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:01 pm
What if it is “forced” out of us by the time we grow old enough to make those kinds of decisions? It could be the way society raises its children and makes them more prone to make the wrong decisions. When we are children, we don’t understand fully what our parents and society teach us. We can only observe society and make basic assumptions and judgments. It is like having one lonely person secluded from all of society all their life and only letting them observe humanity. Would this person hold all of society’s faulty social judgments?
Maybe the reason many people are prone to faulty social judgments is because their peers, parents, the media, and whoever they follow and look up to act in such behavior that children grow up to not completely understand how to make basic and correct judgments. It could be a multitude of factors from improper parenting skills such as abuse, to not teach a child about the world and the child being very naive, to too many people in the world, to religion, etc.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:58 am
Conditioning probably has a lot to do with it along with a monkey see/monkey do mentality, but I still think that the innate ability may be lost in the transition from baby brain to adult brain.