Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

One experimenter gave accurate clues; the other gave inaccurate ones.... But for half of the children the game was rigged so that ultimately they would find the hidden objects.

So one adult was always giving bad advice and one was always giving good advice. But in half the games it was rigged so the child always found the toy even if they looked in the wrong places. The advice from the adults was still always bad and good advice for the rigged games.

Afterwards they asked the kids who they thought were more helpful. Even though one adult was giving bad advice always and one adult was giving good advice always the 4-5 years olds only discerned this if they actually lost the game when they didn't follow the good advice, even though the adult giving bad advice was always still giving bad advice.

I think the key is they must have rigged the game to ensure the bad advice adult was always still giving bad advice. If the bad advice turned into good advice in the rigged version then it wouldn't work, just like you said.

But how can advice for winning a game be either bad or good if you will win whatever you do? That's the part I don't understand.

I think the point they were trying to make was that even though the kids had benefitted in earlier games from helpful advice and received no benefit when given unhelpful advice that by being allowed to then succeed in the rigged game the kids failed to acknowledge the value of the earlier advice. This shown by the kids not having a preference for the more helpful person. Though I think the conclusion they are drawing would really depend on the sample size of games a kid was given in order for the kid to be able to distinguish good & bad advice from the game simply being pure chance all along.

I still don't see it. How on earth would a kid recognize unhelpful advice if it still resulted in finding the object? The kid does not know the game is rigged. I think it is more likely the article has not fully explained the experiment. It would make me sad to think this was actually published.

Say the advice is "look behind the couch in the living room" and the object is later found on the kitchen counter. And the rigging consists of the experimenter asking the kid to get something unrelated from the kitchen, for example.

But yes, it's hard to determine whether this is how the experiment worked from the article. Unfortunately the actual paper at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516... is paywalled in the usual way.

> Unfortunately the actual paper at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096516.... is paywalled in the usual way.

Searching for

    "title of article" PDF

is usually pretty effective (and is in this case ;-) ). In CS you'll find a PDF hosted on the author's home page like 99% percent of the time. Other fields are more spotty, but this approach is still pretty effective.

I used my student super powers on that and now have the answer!

There was actually 4 similar studies described in the article. But the first one is the most important.

The setup was that the kid would watch a video where a toy was hidden in one of two cups. The helpful person would point out to the kid in which cup the toy was hidden. The unhelpful person would not give any hints at all but rather just explain which toy was hidden. The kid would of course follow the helpful persons advice, but would have to guess in void of any advice.

The kid would then get to guess in which cup the toy was hidden, whereafter the answer was revealed in the video. However, in the successful condition, the answer was modified so the kid would guess right no matter what.

This was repeated eight times, after which the kid got to choose which person would give them advice for four more trials.

It was in this situation it showed that the kids who had always been successful did not seem to value the better advice they would expect to get from the helpful person while the kids who had failed due to lack of advice chose the helpful person.

In the article they discuss this being due to the kid trusting their own ability to guess, not needing any help.

I'd say that the results are academically interesting as they increase our understanding of children's decision making. But I don't think they should be taken out of context and be applied as a some kind of answer on how to do parenting and teaching.

I'm with you. I think the whole "good" advice and "bad" advice is relative. It could be misconstrued and applied to the real world. Someone could say that "good" advice is stealing, ripping off people's accounts because if you do it right, you get to reap the rewards earlier than hard work and you don't have to suffer the consequences. In this case, it sounds to me like the researchers are painting "good" and "bad" by their own subjective opinion, and they end up getting the obvious "I didn't agree with your conclusion" result, but from children. When those children grow up and start calculating the extra time it takes based on poor advice, they will probably learn and come to different conclusions like we all have. But as it is, children are naturally trusting and don't expect some jerk is going to lie to them. Too bad the world is harsh.

Perhaps, in the "win whatever you do" case, the item is originally placed somewhere, and the good advice really does relate to that place—so there's a way to win "authentically." And then, if the child never searches that place, then the item is moved—to a place unrelated to the clues—so that they will find it.

The advice was "good advice" in the sense of "if you had followed the advice, you would have found the item before the taking-pity-on-you time limit." But it's not "good advice" in the sense of it having any relation to where the item was ultimately found—and therefore it can't be inferred to have been good advice just from the evidence the child has at that point.

On the other hand, if the game is played iteratively (like an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma), it would eventually become clear (presuming the child managed to find the item by themselves some of the time) that there is this "taking-pity-on-you time limit", and that some of the advice has a correlation to where the item is before that time limit. The child would likely intuit the "taking-pity-on-you" moment as the true loss condition of the game, and become upset when it happened, just as if they had been told they lost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com