Babies' random choices become their preferences
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Your entire identity, hobbies, likes and relationships are a construct of your environment, genes and randomness. I personally feel that "Being who you are", "Staying true to yourself" etc, are very negative things to tell someone, that we tell each other like crabs in a bucket. You absolutely can and should shape your identity around what type of person you want to become in the future. You can objectively look at your likes and behaviors and decide to replace them. If you're on the spectrum, like I suspect a lot of HN readers are, in some ways it's even easier to take this kind of detached view of yourself. Personally, I used to really like X, it was a core part of my identity. One day I simply decided to not do X anymore, I didn't like the people doing X and I didn't see any successful people in my orbit, and I replaced it with Y & Z. It changed the type of people I was around, it changed my career path, and my core personality. Just like you can choose to work on your computer, house, you car, etc. you can choose to work on your identity, personality and likes. There is no one true yourself, just many different versions and possibilities.
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> You absolutely can and should shape your identity around what type of person you want to become in the future.
If your entire identity is shaped by the things you listed above, how is the "type of person you want to become" not also a product of those same things? That is, how are your wishes independent yet your identity contingent?
My wish to change and then taking an action to change is a function of the environment and everything that came before, probably I read or heard about it somewhere. Similarly, perhaps by me writing about it here a neuron will flip in someone else's mind that the way "they are" is not immutable, and that they can take an active role in molding their own personality and likes.
So while your knowledge and perception of the universe is always imperfect, it can also always improve. Pursuit of your better self is the means by which you both improve yourself and your knowledge of what that better self is.
On a side note, it's interesting to meta-analyze the strategy and realize that the kind of person you want to become is also shaped by the same factors. However, I find I have a much better chance at arriving at a "correct" or "best" aim by objectively analyzing identities other than my own, and then changing my own to match, than by simply following my own random impulses.
They've had people rate various prizes by desirability. Then the person receives a prize of lesser desirability. Later, when asked again the person will rate the item they received higher. It is reasoned that the person's psyche would rather increase the desirability of what they did receive rather than accept that they received something that "sucks".
Taking only the study itself into consideration, one could easily argue that the participants "knocked it before they tried it", i.e. by taking up smoking they realized how nice it actually is.
I am not trying to revive 60's tobacco propaganda, but I would say for a lot of personality/opinion/habit/preference changes in general this explanation is very likely (and far less sinister)
"Had some start a smoking habit" for a study does not sound like an ethical study to me.
I used to be a pretty picky eater and wouldn't eat things because I thought I didn't like them. This didn't change until I started to intentionally try things that were new, or that I thought I didn't like. Turns out, a lot of stuff is really good, and me not liking them was based in lack of experience, not in my actual taste!
Toddlers will observe their parents facial expressions and behaviors even as they're being served. If you scrunch your nose when giving them broccoli, they won't like it. If you incentivize eating it, they learn they're not "supposed" to like it. At the other extreme, if the parents fight for the last piece of broccoli the kid will happily join in, in my direct experience. Somehow we have convinced our toddler that broccoli is the best thing ever and lollipops will break her teeth and should be avoided :D Your reaction to hearing about this kind of "conditioning" is also no doubt a product of your own environment.
For things like sour or spicy which may be unpleasant at first, repeated and consistent small exposure over time changes their preferences almost without fail. Millions of Korean kids loves Kimchi as a staple, if you could replicate that environment your kid would too.
I used to hate ginger but drinking ginger kombucha, which has a ginger taste but isn't overwhelming, slowly acclimated me to the taste of ginger. A few months later and I actually liked ginger.
I can still see why I use to hate it but it's just...more palatable now.
The more I looked into flavors (bitter, salty, sour, sweet, umami) I realized I almost always had issues with sour. Not anymore.
We do. The taste buds of young children are attuned to liking sweet. Milk is sweet (lactose), and poisonous foods are usually not, so its of evolutionary use. As is switching teeth.
From what I read, it takes about 10 times till a child likes something they disliked before. Force feeding leads to trauma though; so we provide our child with options and encourage her to sample. One particular quote I use (translated from Dutch): "you don't know yet how it tastes. If you try it you'll find it out. Maybe you're missing out?" I want to stimulate her curiosity because its a trait I like (in both her parents). She won't get an alternative food though, and she will be allowed her desert regardless.
As for sour, we combine yogurt (sour) with custard (vanilla, sweet) at times. The balance is more in favor of the latter for the child; parents eat a more sour version. From my memory I disliked bitter as child (some vegetables are abundant with that taste). Now I drink coffee black daily, and love bitter vegetables, as long as the taste is combined with herbs, spices, pepper, and other flavors such as sweet/sour/salty/umami (while respecting the bitterness as being the dominant taste).
Usually only around half of what we serve them will be eaten by all 3 kids. What they don't eat I generally eat for lunch the next day.
There are also some completely random habits. Take asparagus for example. One toddler won't eat the tips.
> Toddlers will observe their parents facial expressions
> and behaviors even as they're being served.
I do not know who broke to them the secret, but now the little one does not like them anymore. The older still eats the fish with me, but of course no longer as a desert.
I disagree with this though I think I understand how the lack of nuance in "be yourself" can allow it to be easily misinterpreted.
> I used to really like X, it was a core part of my identity. One day I simply decided to not do X anymore, I didn't like the people doing X and I didn't see any successful people in my orbit, and I replaced it with Y & Z.
This is basically the textbook definition of "Being who you are" or "Staying true to yourself"
"Being who you are" means that you keep your values static and shape your decisions around those, unless there is some additional nuance to this.
The GP is making a point that you need to make a clear assessment of yourself - in particular your actions, your deficiencies and strengths and identify values to adopt which could make a positive impact to your life. That's not the the same thing according to me, unless I misinterpreted what you intended.
I think life advice is much more case-by-case than we tend to acknowledge.
Maybe Person A needs to stop being so hard on themselves, stop conforming to other people's expectations for once, and just live life the way they want to live it. But maybe Person B needs to take a good hard look at their life choices, and understand that they've been hurting themselves and the people who love them. Maybe Person C needs to take a risk every once in a while, learn to think outside the box. But maybe Person D needs to get their affairs in order and start following through on long-term plans. Maybe Person E is too nice, and Person F isn't nice enough.
Some people need to hear "be who you are." Other people need to hear the opposite.
I used to hate those as a young person. They always sounded trite, cliché. Now I recognize them for what they are - pointers to experiences. Pointers in the programming sense. You just won't get a piece of folk wisdom until you've lived through a situation to which it applies, and then thought about it and perhaps did some introspection. But after that, that proverb becomes a concise and convenient way to communicate to others who also get it, "hey, the situation will likely evolve this way", or "consider applying this pattern of reasoning to the situation".
The best proverbs are phrased in such a way to at least point you in the right direction if you don't understand them. But in the end, you can't skip experiencing the subject of the proverb yourself.
Given how few people achieve meaningful success or happiness under their own steam it seems fundamentally risky listening to their advice. Most people are playing status games - there are a lot of losers and no winners in status games these days. The world is too big.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013827
TL;DR: we think we know why we do stuff we do, but we do not.
Staying true to yourself is not a good idea if you have an inaccurate self-image. It will cause great harm.
On the other hand you can’t in fact shape your identity around arbitrary desires about who you want to be.
There are constraints to what is possible for you become, especially if you care about being happy.
Knowing and respecting those constraints can be seen as a more positive interpretation of “being true to oneself”. Interpreting it this way, there is no ‘one true identity’, but there is definitely a sense of who you are, and who you it’s better not to try to be.
As Yoda would say, "there is no why" https://youtube.com/watch?v=TJ8KIzkCAto
Because we are so much at the whim of our environment, it can work against you to follow someone else's advice, because the advice is based on seemingly similar but different experiences, and the best thing you can do is to act mindfully in every moment, which is what "being yourself" is about, in my opinion.
Acknowledging that you are in big part of your environment, and that you are the product of the combined imprint of life's experiences, you try to act in the best possible way you know how, given the combination of all of your experiences up to that moment, rather than some kind of answer you tried to prepare ahead of time, because that time was in the past, and your combined experiences now exceed those you had when making that plan in the past.
At the anecdotal, personal experience level, I noticed that many of the people I met in college who were depressed or otherwise somehow stuck were stuck “looking for themselves” to the point that I decided the cliche that we should all find ourselves should be considered harmful. There was just so many of these people out there.
Around that same time I came to believe, as a countervailing measure if anything, that to the extent possible, in the absence of other direction or desire, people should do what they are good at. Being good at something and doing it feels good and will in time become what you like and “who you are.” You’ll be good at it, and everything will be great. If you’re not good at anything, the challenge, then, is to find something you’re good at. But drifting from thing to thing trying to find yourself is way harder and less reliable, and I think this is because as this article says, there is no yourself to find.
That is one of the most disturbing facts that nobody ever talks about. And the fact that it was experimentally showed decision is made before we are aware of it.
And it takes a huge swing at what we believe to be our agency/free will etc. Its not far fetch to consider that we could possibly be a mere passengers in a meat bodies convinced that we are in control.
That’s...not what “random” means. That is, if anything, a factor that makes the choice less likely to be random. The greater commitment of resources that needs to be made, intuitively, the less likely the decision is to be made randomly.
That they are “equally bright and colorful” (even if that is objectively true) doesn't mean that there is no basis for preference, just that how bright and colorful they are isn't the basis.
As I summarized in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24801879), the researchers showed fairly convincingly that choice-induced preference change can cause an effect that is opposite to what you would expect if the original choice was based on individual preference.
Edit: Endowment effect with one famous experiment with mugs from Kahneman (1990). That's the one we replicated in class. Pretty cool come to think of it to use a famous experiment as a first introduction to the field.
I think the economic term is adverse selection: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adverseselection.asp
But only if (we think) it's our own doing, right? Because (per another comment - I haven't paid to read the study) they didn't see the same effect if they gave the babies the toy.
Now I don't understand how the experiment works at all. You can't make the choice for them; and you can't be sure their choices are random. They may have preferences before the experiment, based on whatever. The conclusion that the act of choosing changes their preference seems impossible to prove.
If memory serves:
They had patients sort paintings by preference, told them they could have a copy of whatever they ranked 2nd or 3rd (of course they'd pick the one they ranked 2nd), told them (falsly) they'd be mailed their copy, came back in a week and had them rank the same paintings again. More often than should be explained by chance, patients would rank what had been 2 as 1 or what had been 3 as 4 or 5; their preferences for these paintings changed in the direction of their choice, despite choosing freely and even though they didn't remember making the decision.
That sounds like a lousy thing to do to someone with amnesia. I hope they got copies of paintings in the end, even if they don't remember how they got them.
One of the most powerful cognitive concepts I learned growing up was that of arbitrariness, which allows you to step back and see things at a general level, rather than case-by-case. It's unfortunate that, I agree, many people would say "random" to mean the same thing, because I think the difference between arbitrary and random is significant and useful to know.
They could be drawn to the toy's color, or shape, or any number of other things.
Otherwise, there doesn't seem to be any basis for concluding that the initial choice was random.
> Specifically, we found that after selecting from two equally attractive objects, infants subsequently devalued the initially unchosen object. We ruled out the possibility that this reflects a desire for novelty or any intrinsic preference among the options.
The experimental design that allowed them to do this is simple, but pretty clever. The original version of the experiment is based on first letting the baby choose between toys A and B, and then demonstrating that if A was chosen, the baby prefers a new toy C over B. (All of the toys were equally likely to be preferred by a control group.)
Since it's not possible to know whether the initial choice was random or based on individual preference, they did a modified version of this experiment. After the baby is shown the first two toys, they are placed under boxes and secretly swapped. Despite originally having chosen B, the baby instead gets to interact with A. In this case, the babies still fairly consistently choose C (the new toy) over B (the one they originally preferred but didn't get to interact with).
And as the press release does mention, simply giving a baby a toy randomly chosen by the experimenter doesn't cause the same effect. So the reasonable inference is that the actual experience of making a choice (or at least having the illusion of doing so) reduces one's attachment to the option that wasn't chosen.
I'm having trouble understanding your description of the experiment. How does selecting C over B, after initially preferring B, support the thesis that random choices become preferences? Shouldn't the baby select B over C to support that thesis?
The idea is that the baby selected the box they believed contained B, but it actually contained A. Apparently the baby concluded that since they had opened the box that they chose, they must have chosen the toy inside, and they now like A better and B worse.
Otherwise, it does seem like they've demonstrated (something like?) choice induced preference change in babies, and it's additionally interesting that it can be tricked that way.
I meant this bit:
> After the baby is shown the first two toys, they are placed under boxes and secretly swapped. Despite originally having chosen B, the baby instead gets to interact with A.
If the baby actually tracks the swapping (probably unlikely), then I think it's not the case that they "originally [chose] B" - unless (quite possible) I am misunderstanding something, which is why I seek clarification.
I can imagine my brother's wife having fun testing with their daughter though :D
The fact that all the toys were equally preferred by a control group is an unconvincing control since individuals have different preferences.
It's swap methodology is also unconvincing. Why couldn't the baby simply be avoiding a toy that was effectively taken away?
It actually is explained this way in the paper: "If infants do exhibit choice-induced preference change, they should prefer the novel toy and avoid the previously unchosen toy."
The thing is, they are not only testing for this "obvious" conclusion. Each subsequent experiment tries to invalidate the previous one's conclusions. They thought of 4 experiments, and maybe even more could be done.
> It's swap methodology is also unconvincing. Why couldn't the baby simply be avoiding a toy that was effectively taken away?
This is a good reasoning — if the infants are aware of the swap, their thinking could be "I chose that and didn't get it, now I don't like it / don't want it anymore". Even then, it still points to the same direction: the infants are changing their preferences based on their first choice, now rejecting something they wanted but didn't get.
(from the article)
I've found it helps to not hold any of your kids preferences static. If they like something now, don't assume they will still like it 2 weeks from now. Consciously give them the space to change their mind.
The experimental setup doesn’t have ecological validity as a model for babies typical environments.
The experimenters had to go out of their way to manufacture a situation in which the choice produced a random result.
This is a clever experiment that produces a useful result about choice strengthening preference.
It doesn’t however generalize into the idea that our preferences are a consequence of mere randomness.
1. In the absence of the contrived situation, choices will reflect the genetic predispositions of the baby, coupled with what is afforded by the environment.
2. If someone acts to create a contrived situation for the baby, then preferences will be systematically biased by that contrivance.
Neither of these are surprising statements, although the experiments results confirm (or can be deduced from) #2.
The random case doesn’t actually occur outside the laboratory, and if it did, it would be just a special case of #2.
So, “who we are is just a product of random choices we made as babies” is not a good interpretation of this result because babies actually don’t make random choices unless you put them in a special laboratory situation.
Marvin Harris, known for his work on Cultural Materialism, writes in his books how such and such tribe are as they are, like more peaceful or belligerent due to differences in their environments, and a lot of hypothesis make sense but he ties himself in a knot trying to explain why two tribes in the Amazon that are neighbours, with the same diet etc and one is very aggressive and one is peaceful.
I thought maybe by pure chance one aggressive man got to power with violence and then he and his descendants imposed that culture. Same thing with many beliefs in cultures.
The human animal is characterized by this: learning from a single example. For better and worse. Its the reason we created civilization; its the reason we believe in witchcraft and the lottery.
E.g. walk into a chimp's domain with a screwdriver, fool with the screw on an outlet cover, set the screwdriver on the floor and leave. The chimp may wander over, may pick up the screwdriver, might chew on it.
A 3-year-old human will go straight to the screwdriver and jam it into the socket.
I'm not sure anything new was shown by this experiment.
When we are children, we don't have much innate fear. We don't fear falling down too much, but we can learn to fear it if we get hurt. As a kid, you can learn how to fall down without getting hurt; your head isn't so far off the ground, your bones are not brittle yet. As an adult if you fear falling down, you will almost certainly hurt yourself when you fall. If you didn't go down that path as a kid, you may never take up skiing, or mountain biking, or other sports.
Let's assume that the baby has a perfect ordered ranking of blocks, 3 > 2 > 1, but that the experimenter doesn't know what it is.
There's three scenarios for what the new, third block is: 1, 2 or 3.
If it's 2 or 3, then the rejected block in the first round has a score of 1, and so we'd expect. So we'd only expect the baby to switch in a third of the cases, as opposed to 50% of the cases where the blocks are assumed to be equal.
"However, in the critical test trial that followed, 16 of 21 infants (76.2%) chose the new block (block C; Fig. 1)"
I can't work out the p-value vs. 66% compared to 50%, though...
Why are they (journalist/researcher (?)) surprised that in the 2nd round the baby chooses c over b? [Of course, if you force the baby to pick either b or a in the first round, she will be equally likely to pick c or not in the second round]
Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair.
He [Wahram] was very aware of this, having lived the process many times; so he paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular moment in his life. So often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set of habits. There was some searching to be done, in other words, some testing of different possibilities. that was the interregnum, in fact, the naked moment before the next exfoliation of habits, the time when on wandered doing things randomly. The time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world.
Moreover, I think there's an element of competence being enjoyable. If I start to learn a hobby and experience little successes along the path to competence, that will reinforce it as something that I want to do. Eventually you'll get good at it, or at least for very young children better at it than anything else you can do, and again, competence is enjoyable.
There's also possibly an element of a sunken cost fallacy. You've spent x amount of time or resources on some thing, so you start to justify to yourself why it's worthwhile to pursue or to have done.
When a baby picks a toy and finds that causes no harm but actually fun, doesn't it make sense that they would pick the same thing the next time over something different and new and unfamiliar which might not cause fun but might in fact be dangerous?
What if how it works is: we each see some math problems and symbols and make a guess as to how it works. If we are right, we decide we are good at math. If we are wrong we decide we are bad at math. Identity forms, then it is hard to revise your self assessment.
I cannot see how these two studies relate to each other except both having "random" and "behavior" in the description...
Say we play a video of another child paying on a scooter. Then we put the scooter near the child. Will the child be more likely to copy what they have seen in the video?
I need to explicitly choose to do/get something different.
don't worry though folks, the replication crisis worriers will just file this as exception that proves the rule
Second: Why do you argue against a made-up straw man "replication crisis worrier"? The crisis is based on a large percentage of studies, including foundational ones, being not yielding the same results when done again. This is not a notion you can throw out by reciting a single counter example (whose existence no one even denies?!)...
> Recall that in the induction trial, approximately equal numbers of infants chose each block—there was no systematic preference for any particular block. But what if all infants had their own idiosyncratic but consistent object preferences? ...
Then they sort of test that hypothesis in Experiment 4, by making the infants choose a block in the induction trial but then giving them the block they had not chosen – and even in this case the infants, in the next step of the trial, tend to reject the block they didn't get in the induction trial, which in this case was the block they had initially chosen. This needs to be combined with the previous findings, such as those from Experiment 2, in which the experimenters gave the infants a block, and Experiment 3, in which the infants' choice is blind (they din't know what was inside each box) — in these cases, the infants didn't show the same rejection tendency for the block they didn't get as in Experiments 1 and 4.
Seems like odd behavior...
Who wants to tell them?