Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers | Hacker News Reader

Challenging ‘rule breakers’ – children will confront their peers

plymouth.ac.uk

80 pointsrustoo66 comments

Eh, the study calls "rule breakers" the children who seemingly make mistakes applying a set of rules to a puzzle.

These aren't kids acting out in class and being put back in line by their peers, it's two kids doing some pair programming.

Am I "confronting" my coworker when I suggest a different way to loop than the one they implemented?

Nothing wrong with the study, just saying the word "challenging" is not used here in the layperson sense, that is confrontationally.

In modern schools, most any deviation from prescribed behavior is considered "rule breaking". A kid playing a game they way they want to play it, rather than the way they were taught to play it, is a disruptive kid that needs correction by peers or authority figures.

I've seen this!

When the toddler plays an iPad game he likes to start by "failing" (choosing the wrong option, deliberately crashing a toy car, doing nothing at all) and watching what happens. It looks to me like he's basically experimenting - trying things and watching what happens. I generally just let him try and fail (and discuss what happened with him) and after about 1-2 minutes he tries the "right" thing because it helps him make progress - or hits the "X" and quits if he can't figure it out.

But some folks who watch him do this get pretty mad -- "no, kid, you're supposed to click on the blue one! No, don't crash the car, go down there! You have to push something!". This is an interesting philosophy, and while it's not one I share I'm not gonna intervene because he needs to get used to hearing this from people sometimes.

My 1 yr old does this all the time when exploring the world. I have had to tell my 17-year old stepchild who easily gets down on failures, that my role as a parent isn’t to protect my children from failure, but to protect them from catastrophic failure (ones that cannot be easily recoverable from).

Myself, it isn’t something I learned until I was an adult, encountering “growth mindset” and practicing martial arts. Failures are the foundation of growth and anti-fragility, and works better if you can un-identify with it.

I have this problem, and it takes concerted effort for me not to "fix" those situations. Even though I know they're better off if they figure it out themselves, my desire to "help" people is very hard to overcome. I use quotes around those words because I know that what I'm doing is not actually those things in many cases, and they'd actually be better off if I waited for them to ask for help.

This, so much this. Happens all the time both w/ the kids and at work. I've had to learn this one in both places and one helps the other.

I still find it easier at work. I find it's easier to distract myself w/ just answering some slack messages from someone else while 'looking interested' on the video call w/ someone while they figure something out after I gave them a hint. It was so much harder while at the office though and it still is so much harder w/ the kids.

How do you make yourself wait? I still haven't figured out why sometimes I can wait for them to figure it out and sometimes I can't.

How do I wait? Hmmm... Poorly. Like I said, it's a struggle. But I think in the end I remind myself what's better for them.

I think it also helps to think of myself in that situation, and what I'd want. I do not want people to take a puzzle from me. I'd much rather work at it until I'm frustrated, and I will actually lash out verbally if people try to solve it for me. So remembering that helps. But it's hard to remember that because most people actually seem to not like puzzles, and seem like they would rather just have the solution.

At work, I just give hints most of the time, and try not to actually spend any of my time on it beyond that. Things like, "I'm pretty sure there's a function that does something similar already. It's probably in the XY component?" and leave it at that until they fail to find it. But if it's a fun problem, I still fail at that.

Thinking "meta" this same behavior (adults intervening in how children play games) is analogous to the phenomenon described by the article, that is children correcting their peers.

It's like that with Lego.

Some people grab the bricks, mess around, create and destroy chaotically, explore.

But then there's this whole other culture. They create the thing described by the directions, step by step.

I was a combo of both. I would build the thing one time when it was brand new. It was a good way of learning how some pieces could be combined and be used in designs. After that, all the pieces got placed into big buckets for later assembly into whatever. I've never had a lego "build" last longer than a few days.

I think I treated Lego instruction books a bit as my bible. Thou shalt built this, at least once. Most of my creativity was in composition: I would built a city out of all those more or less built-to-instruction sets, and would overhaul said city every few months or so. Road plates would have sidewalks, roads with directions, that I would type and print on a computer, rail, preferable with a higher bridge somewhere every time. Once the whole city was built up and complete (no space left empty), I'd take it all away and compose a new city.

Man, we do both in my house.

When I was a kid, I mostly had pile-of-legos and not sets. I did very little following of the directions.

My kids *love* just messing around with piles of LEGO (and even Duplo) and making their own creations: mostly weapons. And they also love working on the 3000 piece crazy-complicated sets, presorting everything and figuring out where to put each piece step by step.

There's a whole lot of creative, unstructured play (not really heading towards mastery of sculpting or design), and a whole lot of concentrating replicating a model. It'd be kind of neat if they'd decide to do something inbetween.

A toddler probably gets as much 'reward' from the Skinner box like iPad games on failure as on success. It makes a noise, flashes an interesting image.

The reason to 'succeed' an older child is to satisfy the conditions and progress in the game, a toddler maybe gets equal reward (at first) because they don't see why driving further is success.

Once the novelty of the first set of sounds and images is exhausted then interaction products new images and so greater 'reward'.

Doesn't seem useful behaviourally?

Being able to control the game and progress on demand is still mastery, even if the spectacular failure is interesting to explore first.

I blow up plenty of things in Kerbal Space Program in interesting ways before deciding to buckle down and get more science.

Playing around with the "wrong" geometrical proof instead of taking the straightforward and known-to-myself approach isn't harming me, either.

Young kids like exploring the whole state space-- not just the ones we're likely to label as success or useful. Then at some point later they get afraid to fail-- especially to be seen failing. It's a mixed bag: motivation to push "forward" is useful, but fear of failure prevents deeper understanding or full effort sometimes.

Which is a contrast to say, watching what Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood teaches 2-4 year olds about conflict resolution, taking turns, and finding ways to play together.

You're talking about US modern schools, right? (Genuine question)

Not my school in the US.

Cynical me thinks there is no actual underlying experience driving the observation.

this was my entire experience in "computer" classes K–12 in the 90s–00s. never once were we encouraged to play around or try new things. we were taught to follow instructions to the letter to use computers to complete arbitrary tasks exactly as prescribed. the closest thing to letting us "color outside the lines" was letting us literally pick the color and bgcolor attributes for the HTML4 web pages we made for some assignments in "Web Development" class... in 2008. (of course about half of our graduating class had all already taught themselves rudimentary CSS to style their MySpace profiles a few years prior!) around 2004(!!) we spent a couple weeks learning HyperCard (in the Classic Mac emulator OSX used to ship with), and while I immediately recognized the possibilities for making games and interactive stories and all kinds of neat stuff using this then-ancient software, nope, just shut up and make this slide presentation about snakes or whatever like the assignment tells you to. I've posted about this here in the past but looking back I have this vague feeling that, at least in these computer classes, the teachers like barely had a grasp on how to do anything with computer outside of specifically prescribed tasks of the assignments they had us do, and were sort of scared of anyone like me who wanted to eff around and see what all we could do with the technology. part of me has always wanted to be a public school computer class teacher just so I can instill some of the sense of discovery and creativity that access to these powerful machines grant us, that I was never given in school growing up.

In a computer class in the 90s, it would actually have made some sense. Schools have never had good IT staff, and it was easy to screw things up accidentally. Hell, in '94 I was in USAF tech school and watched a guy answer yes to the "WARNING: This will remove all data on non-removable disk drive C:" prompt not 30 seconds after the teacher explicitly said that getting that message meant you had mistyped. Allegedly an adult, and actually a pretty smart guy, but still managed to render that particular workstation unusable for a while.

Today, the school uses disposable VMs which are built on demand and nothing the student does can render them inoperable. And Chromebooks that are similarly unkillable. Different world now than 25 years ago, for sure. My kids' school gives the students wide latitude to screw up.

reasonably fair assessment, but the problem with Chromebooks is that they're basically glorified smartphones as opposed to desktop PCs, in that they're consumption devices as opposed to creative devices. sure you can get various chrome extensions (presumably not on these school Chromebooks though) that let you get part of the way there—I passed my first semester of CS using only a Chromebook with the Secure Shell extension to remote into my linux box at home—but by and large the era of everyone having the untapped creative power of a cheap commercial desktop PC in their home is kind of over now, and in my opinion we largely squandered that wonderful time by not encouraging more young people to play around with them creatively.

In my last year of high school in the 70s, the school acquired a Business Basic 4 computer to do some of the administration work. They also created a computer class for the students, where we punched out programs on punch cards, and the teacher would batch run them overnight.

The teacher did not allow any students near that computer, as he was sure we were going to hack it and wreck everything.

(Yes, hacking was a thing even in the 70s!)

It was a pretty common feature of the schools I grew up in.

My second-earliest school memory was being asked to sit on my nametag in Kindergarten (the standard time out). We were doing an activity where we were supposed to circle whether something made a short or long O sound, and were listening to an audio tape with headphones. The words were printed on the worksheet, though, so I went ahead and circled all the correct ones and then sat quietly doing nothing. When the aide noticed she sent me to the tag on the carpet and then everyone forgot about me because I was so quiet. I would guess I was there for quite some time, but my 5 year old notion of time was wacked.

I have many more memories of similar things: being punished for doing math problems in different ways, or completing work early, mutually agreeing to play a board game by different rules during "free time", or responding to an essay prompt in an unexpected way.

I am now a teacher at an independent school which my 3 sons attend. Faculty tries really hard to avoid doing this. It is aggravating and difficult when you have 20 kids and a subset go off in a completely different direction than you were hoping to reach with the activity. I can totally understand that with larger classes like most public schools have, a worse behavior baseline, etc, how one would be tempted to leap to chastisement.

When Flight Simulator came out, my first thought was to see what would happen when you crashed the airplane. People would actually get upset as I would try to crash it. These were adults! They'd get so into the game they were afraid of crashing the imaginary airplane.

(It was a bit disappointing, it would only freeze the screen and draw a crack across it!)

Surely by 2021 there is the equivalent of Burnout for aviation games?

If someone crashes out of curiosity what happens then I think that's cool, but I have had someone deliberately crash it as a way of annoying me which I found quite rude (i.e. the equivalent of pretending to be illiterate in response to being suggested a book to read).

DCS (a military flight simulator) does have damage models for the aircraft - (especially in VR) getting your wing shot off is very fun

I don't think your criticism is valid. Children often play games that have rules. Comparing candyland or soccer or "block game we inevented for this experiment" to different ways of programming a loop misses the point.

A valid point, although it's probably the article, not the study itself. The actual title is "Children across societies enforce conventional norms but in culturally variable ways". I say "probably", because I haven't looked into the paper - perhaps it does use this terminology after all (but I doubt it).

I saw the new James Bond movie last night and hated the ending. Not so much because it wasn't appropriate, as because they broke the rule. And not so much the rule, as the Prime Directive. My reaction felt like a kind of disgust. At the rule breakers. The same kind I'd feel at a cheater in a game.

But of course there's no sense in which I'd been cheated. This kind of surprise is meat and potatoes to almost any fiction. I think that's not despite this kind of inborn reaction, but to leverage it. This particular movie just had a lot of leverage to work with.

What rule? I didn't watch the movie nor do I know much about James Bond beyond watching a few of the films over the past few decades.

Spoiler (obviously) but trying not to give away too much, I'm sure the rule in question is that the hero is meant to live happily ever after.

Except that never applied to Bond; any time he seemed to be about to have some semblance of a normal life terrible stuff happens to him and/or his loved one(s).

an event happens that terminates the series for good.

though I bet in 4 years the producers will change their mind and retcon the series back to life.

Current Hollywood would just start remaking them. No time/budget for new scripts.

The movie ended with "James Bond will return". There's not even an implied end of the series. They pretty proudly showed off that it was continuing.

I don't recall exactly right now, but I remember an article that had a 2x2 description of people who are vocal vs. internalized and rule-abiding vs. rulebreaker-tolerating.. or something like that.

It did help me accept (or at least understand) a little bit more some people I observe who just live their lives like "it's all good" or "if the person does that, they must need it really bad".

I never really understood that kind of mentality, for 2 reasons.

1) When someone breaks the rules, and goes unchecked, it just encourages them to do it more and reinforces their belief that the bad behavior is acceptable. And there is something to the notion that seeing people break the rules degrades respect for the rules in general.

2) Every time someone breaks the rules, it's a tax on those who follow the rules. Why am I inconveniencing myself by following rules when others just go ahead and break them? Or in another way of saying it, especially when rules are only partially enforced, the people who follow the rules are made suckers. Better to not have the rule at all.

I guess this became a bit more frustrating to me over time (or maybe because of age) as I understand rules better and have an opinion on their validity (especially the history of them), to see people giving up on the idea of enforcing rules or standards at the request of people who break the rules, or people who just have sympathy for them.

Well then, why did we create the rules in the first place? Just toss the rules out, and let everyone go free-for-all, so that the rule-abiding people aren't paying a tax while others go "scot-free". So easy, isn't it, for people coming later to forget all the work that it took to experience and solve for these problems that we can just toss them out now.

There was the example of the MIT admissions director who had faked her PhD the whole time (or say, how some people get meaningless paper PhDs from no-name schools to increase their government job pay), and one of my grad school colleagues (toiling away for his PhD!) said, "You would go out of your way to report that? What harm has it done you?". I was incredulous.

Maybe I'm getting more conservative in my old age.

I believe it was pg's, The Four Quadrants of Conformism: http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html

I still think about it quite a bit.

I think some rules are valid for a point in time and become invalid over time (e.g. some of the old Jewish rules around food probably made more sense before modern food mgmt standards).

And pg's point is people / kids follow rules without understanding them for the most part. Or they don't follow the rules for the most part. And a lot of progress comes from the scofflaws who aren't wedded to the current rule set and reject the nonsensical ones.

At some point democracy and not having a blood line king/queen was against the rules. I'm glad some people decided to look past those rules.

Ah yes, that was it, thanks!

1. novice follows the rules because he's told to

2. master follows the rules because he understands the rules

3. guru breaks the rules because his knowledge transcends them

Doing these out of order doesn't work very well.

I think I'm like that, and it feels very related to the "robustness principle" in programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle). "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."

And to the idea that I can change what's in my power - my actions. I have to accept the things I can't change, like the actions of strangers.

And I'm not a judge, I don't like judging people. Who knows, they may have a good reason. Walk a mile in their shoes, and so on.

If there are enough people who think like me, the rules will still mostly hold. And if not, perhaps it wasn't a good rule.

I guess, not really? But this results in justifying any existing rule and that conclusion is incompatible with my existing world view so I end up viewing it as an artifact of rhetoric rather than a result of logic.

As someone who can tolerate just about anything - take it back to the start: we were thrust into this life without our consent. Life is inherently an inconvenience from this perspective. So what if a roommate doesn’t do dishes, if people cheat, break rules, etc? I didn’t even ask to be here in the first place. I am quiet, happy, unbothered, when I adopt this view. But not unambitious, lazy, etc. Quite the contrary. It just seems like complaining about rule-breakers is worse than rule-breaking itself.

Tangentially related, I've looked for research in the past on what compels people to report rule breakers. I find it super interesting that people want to get other people in trouble over (often) things that don't negatively affect them, but instead are just "the rules".

If someone has no real talents apart from following and enforcing arbitrary rules, he/she can rise in the social hierarchy by virtue signaling and reporting others. We see this in many open source projects now.

I suspect it stems from a feeling of fairness: I have to follow the rules, so how come you get away with doing whatever you want? That's intuitively not fair.

Now I don't agree with that from a consequentialist point of view, but I could understand the feeling.

> I find it super interesting that people want to get other people in trouble over (often) things that don't negatively affect them

I find it super interesting that people don't see a gradient here.

On one extreme, you have something like crossing the street against the light when nobody is at the intersection. On the other, you have all sorts of horrific things done to other people.

I'm pretty sure that the bulk of people in wealthy societies would intervene against "rule breakers" well before the horrific extreme. But where they start having qualms is interesting, and where you get all sorts of negative group behaviors, and that point will start to drift in response to how members of the group behave.

> I find it super interesting that people don't see a gradient here.

People tend to divide rules into 2 buckets: Ones that are inviolable and ones that are silly. It's like the old joke that "everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster is a maniac."

In tight-knit homogeneous societies, this leads to a set of "unwritten rules," but in less well-connected or less homogeneous societies, this leads to quite a bit of friction and people harassing each other. My friend is a cop and he gets called to a lot of apartment complexes where there are two cultures abutting each other (e.g. Mexicano and non-hispanic) and it's just both sides calling the cops on each other (in his estimation) not out of racism, but because they disagree on the unwritten rules. Then as each side becomes more convinced of their moral superiority (because we obey all the important rules), the arguments become more and more petty and ticky-tacky.

It's probably some form of crab bucket mentality. Many follow their paleolithic urges when it comes to watching others succeed.

I'll be the first to admit that it takes a little bit of conscious effort for me to look at another person leaving me in the dust and thinking "wow that's awesome. good for them".

Attempting to reframe my own comparative lack of success in terms of "they must have broken the rules or something" is a thing I reserve for competitive video gaming where the likelihood of an actual cheater is very high and the consequences of being wrong in my accusation are zero. Even if I totally delude myself into thinking everyone is using an aimbot and it has nothing to do with my shitty aim and I wind up the worst gamer on earth, I still have the rest of my life to work with.

In my personal experience, when you make your whole existence about winners breaking the rules and you being a relative loser because you follow all the rules, you turn into a monster.

In a society with rules and such, if you're in a battle for social dominance, the rules are your best weapon.

You just need to find a way to create a narrative painting your opponent as a rule-breaker. Evidence needs to be interpreted appropriately, etc.

"If you're in a battle for social dominance" is key, of course.

Consider the present popularity of "victimhood".

For some kids this just means they trust that the rules are there for a very good reason, and so are intrinsically good to follow. As a parent one hopes that your kids come to see your rules in that light, rather than as a tool to exercise power or maximize personal convenience, or any number of abuses.

The tricky rules are the very non-obvious ones, like those involving seat belts. Insurance against very infrequent events are difficult to motivate, and require a sophisticated understanding of risk to not seem arbitrary. (And given the number of baby-boomers who managed to survive childhood despite being thrown into a large back-seat with no seat-belts at all tells me that these rules might not be as wise as we think!)

Reporting rule-breakers is, of course, slightly different because now rule-breaking is not intrinsically bad, but extrinsically good to the person doing the turning in. (The motivation must be power and indirect punishment, and not compassion, because otherwise you'd talk to the rule-breaker first.) This is a favorite weapon that siblings naturally wield against each other at a very young age. That is the perversity of it rules, is that a human's first innocent instinct is to abuse them to harm a sibling. Ain't that something?

>> what compels people to report rule breakers

they still believe there will be consequences to the rule breakers as a result of reporting them...

The scenario descibed in the article isn't children challenging a non conformist for stepping out of line, or using a non standard technique, the children are correcting, perhaps helping, someone who appears to be getting something completely and utterly wrong.

Children teach others. They are learning through the teaching process.

Indeed. The lead author expresses surprise that rural children are more likely to intervene. That's exactly what I'd expect.

Exactly. They’re mimicking how they were taught. My 3yo is all about “let me show you” because that’s exactly what we say when we teach him something/how to use a new toy. When a guest comes over, it’s his turn to show off his new toy and teach them how to use it.

> The children were each taught to play a block sorting game – with half taught to sort the blocks by colour, and half taught to sort them by shape. They were then put into pairs, with one playing the game and the other observing.

At an early stage of development, could this sort of study introduce some sort of neurosis or pathology into these children's behaviors?

My "this might not be harmless" radar is pinging

Both kids in a pair play according to "correct" rules. Just different.

So the possible outcomes are:

- observer forces his version of rules

- observer fail to force his version of rules

- player is forced to abandon the game

- observer is forced to abandon the game

- both observer and player voluntary decide to abandon the game

- both figure out they were given different "correct" set of rules, so they pick one of the sets or come up with a new one

The article doesn't sustain what the headline is indicating.

So, kids are tattle tales? Did we need a study to tell us this?

Eventually we would see a [citation needed] below the claim.

> So, kids are tattle tales?

No, tattle tales report rule breaking to third-party authorities. This is about direct intervention with the rule-breaker.

> Did we need a study to tell us this?

If we want to quantify and see how it varies across, say, the urban/rural divide (as this does with challenging), then, yes, certainly, but it's not this study.

In my experience kids are tattle tales when they have had their power to intervene directly significantly curtailed. I remember a kid asking me to tell my daughter to stop doing some behavior (she was a few years younger than him). I asked him if he had already asked her to stop and he looked at me like I was from mars.

At least where I live, many kids have been taught in many ways that direct intervention is something that will get them in trouble, and tattle-tales are at least partly a result of that.

This is also IMO why girls are more likely to tattle-tale. Girls, on average, get in way more trouble for instigating physical violence than boys, so they have had one method of direct intervention more strongly curtailed.

Correcting 'mistakes' - children help their peers.

> We assumed that, because everyone knows everyone else in small scale communities, direct interventions would be less common, as people could rely on more indirect ways such as reputation to ensure compliance with rules. But we actually found the opposite to be true.

Sigh. This is the kind of bad assumption I would expect from a 1st year college student.

In rural communities, the risk of someone making mistakes is more impactful (and therefor more serious). Rural life is a lot simpler in some ways, as well. In an urban center, there are countless ways to solve problems and discoveries to be made with the materials at hand. Urban mistakes or inefficiencies are well tolerated, as they may simply be a previously unknown solution/technique with their own cost/benefit profile.

I like how the comments are full of people challenging the rule breaking author/title/study

It's: challenging the kids with rule breaking (that's normal kids, not rule breakers).

About true, challenging rule breaker see the movie: "System Crasher" (2019).

Downvoted ? - the title is clickbait: nor the kids are challenging (hard cases), nor challenging others (only confronting, maybe to help), neither they are challenged at any point to do that - but if they do, they are not rule breakers but 'rule breakers' - keepers and conformists to what they been taught (the only rule breaking are the researchers, their challenge is to mess with kids, not being challenged self).

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