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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

In the original experiment -- see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20424094 for the abstract -- the toddlers stood on one side of a slanted table, so that anything placed on the table would roll down to the other side, where the adult actresses were. Presumably, the toddlers were not able to walk around the table.

One way to replicate this at home, albeit imperfectly, is to place your toddler in a high chair, so that if you drop the toy on the floor, she is unable to reach it.

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I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response. Although they might be excellent actresses, being mean to a baby is probably going to make you feel pretty rotten, at a level it might be hard to control, and the baby could be picking up on that.

Animals can pick up subtle cues that are not apparent to adults; I'd be amazed if babies weren't at least as good.

I'm thinking of Clever Hans http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Both actions seem to qualify as "mean to a baby" to me. Assuming the actresses agreed with me, this would cancel out the variable.

I was thinking about that, and the thing is people are often deceptive to children for their own good, as a way to handle them without upsetting them (arguably not ideal parenting but let it pass). So that, if you convince the child you really did drop it, you won't feel bad. But if you are overtly mean - it's unmistakeable that you deliberately the toy back, then it's hard to kid yourself that the baby didn't realize. Now did the baby realize? That's the whole thing we're trying to determine! I'm just saying that the actresses' model of what the baby will understand and won't will affect how they feel about it.

This of course all depends on the actresses having a particular model of the baby's ability to model them.

Point is, the whole gift giving/dropping/witholding might be a red herring, and perhaps the same results could be replicated by having both people give a toy to a baby, but one acting scary and mean. And perhaps if two mannequins went through the same giving/dropping/witholding experiment, the result would not be observed. And perhaps if a smiling actress stole the toy, while a scowling actress dropped the toy, the affect would be reversed.

Simple enough to swap the actresses around to remove the individuals as confounding variables.

On a related note. HN gets pretty obnoxious nit picking about experiments. Guaranteed half the posts about a social science experiment come from novices whining about some flaw only they can see in the experiment yet a hard science paper gets posted and surprisingly no one has any complaints about the experimental design.

How would swapping actresses help?

The issue is not a quality of the individual person, but of their action - and the relationship between their action and the baby's later response to that person is very thing being tested.

BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.

>How would swapping actresses help?

Using many actresses would allow the investigators to see if an individual receives a different response compared to the overall group. But it looks like you actually meant say the babies knew the testers felt bad so refused to share, not because the baby had been slighted. I think you need to read more on what the study tested.

>BTW: Whatever your intention, calling people "obnoxious", "nit picking", "novices" and "whining" because they question something does not actually raise the level of discourse.

Reread your comment:

>I wonder if they controlled the effect of the actresses own response.

The level of disrespect you show is amazing. It would be one thing if you actually read the study and realized that "Hey, they used the baby's mom and a drug addict in withdrawal as the two testers! Clearly the study is flawed." Nope, your first comment is essentially "I wonder if these professionals are incompetent."

What did the study test then? (I don't have a subscription to "Psychological Science", so can't read the full text, at least, not from the above link).

From the abstract on the first expt (and from the story linked here on HN), it seems unambiguous. My understanding is: one actress offered then refused the toy (intentional); a second actress offered but accidently dropped the toy (unintentional). Later, the baby treated the two actresses differently.

My thinking was that it would be impossible to control for the effect I described (i.e. the Clever Hans Effect), given the social nature of what they were investigating. You probably already know about Clever Hans and so didn't read the wikipedia article I linked, but it's pretty entertaining/interesting, and addresses the problems of controlling for the effect in some social experiments (EDIT: what I'm referring to is that it says in some social experiments they can't control for it just have to accept the effect may be there).

It would be really cool if they had a clever way of controlling for it (I've come across a few very clever experimental designs in Psych studies), so I was wondering if they did or not, and if so how.

I didn't think the conductors of the experiment were incompetent.

Thanks for rereading my comment.

Yes, this was my first thought too. The results need to be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism when there is no double blind and the interpretation of the result is subjective.

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