Observation is one of the essential things for toddlers to understand the world. This also applies to the choice of possible social partners. A study with hand puppets now shows the role played by the behavior of the parents.
When making new acquaintances, children around the age of 12 months turn more to people with whom their parents have previously interacted. The little ones observe the behavior of the big ones and see who could be a possible social partner for them, as researchers from Cambridge, USA, write in the “Proceedings” of the US National Academy of Sciences (“PNAS”). This ability is important for navigating safely through the vast sea of ??social relationships.
Previous studies had already shown that young children are able to draw their conclusions from observations in the social context. They are more likely to expect two people to get along well if they like the same food, wear similar clothes, or speak the same language. In addition, young children are more likely to turn to people who have helped others, for example. They are more likely to accept gifts from strangers who speak the same language as themselves or who sing the same songs.
The thesis of the researchers led by Ashley Thomas from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was that small children, in particular, receive valuable information about who a possible interaction partner could be through the behavior of their own parents. To test this assumption, the group conducted various behavioral experiments, each with at least 20 children around the age of one year.
The focus was on the children’s reaction to hand puppets representing potential partners. According to the researchers, they opted for dolls instead of real people because they can be made to act according to strict rules and there are no characteristics such as gender, age or ethnicity. In addition, previous studies had shown that young children would accept dolls as social partners.
The children were shown short films in which a parent interacted with one of two hand puppets present. The interaction consisted of the shown human mimicking the behavior of the puppet. The researchers assumed that the children interpreted imitation as an act of attachment. After that, the little ones were only shown the two hand puppets in another little film and watched how the children reacted to the puppets.
It was found that the children were more likely to turn to the hand puppet that their parent had previously imitated. When the child saw two dolls at the same time that appeared to be calling in one voice, they would turn to the one that had previously interacted with their parent. The effects were absent when another adult did the experiment instead of one parent.
The researchers were also able to show the reverse case with an experiment. At first, the small children only saw a doll, which addressed them by their name. In a second film, they saw a parent mimic despair with his face in his hands. This was flanked by two puppets: one of which had previously interacted with the child, the other not. The children looked more at the already known doll, which according to the researchers expresses an expectation that this doll will help mum or dad more.