BC Council for Families

Cara Hykawy
Communications Assistant
 
Are you trustworthy? Your baby might just know the answer.

New evidence from a study by the Concordia University Department of Psychology suggests that babies as young as 14 months are able to make the basic distinction as to whether an adult is reliable or not.

In the two-stage study, published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development, the Concordia researchers presented infants with canisters that either did or did not contain a small toy. This first stage involved two conditions - the reliable looker condition, and the unreliable looker condition. In the reliable looker condition, the experimenter opened a canister containing a toy, reacted in surprise as to what was inside, and showed the contents of the container to the child. The unreliable condition followed the exact same procedure, except there was no toy inside the canister.

In the second stage the same researcher turned on a touch lamp with her forehead, keeping her hands visibly placed on the table. The infant was then invited to explore the lamp, and to turn it on themselves. This is where it gets interesting. Infants who were tricked in the first stage, were a lot less likely to copy the researcher's unusual actions in the touch-lamp stage of the experiment.

Only 34% of the infants in the unreliable communication group (those who were tricked into thinking there was a toy in the canister, when there was not) imitated the model using their foreheads. In contrast to this, 61% percent of the infants in the reliable communication group (those who were not tricked) imitated the researcher and turned on the lamp with their forehead, just like her.

"This shows infants will imitate behavior from a reliable adult. In contrast, the same behavior performed by an unreliable adult is interpreted as irrational or inefficient, therefore not worth imitating," Concordia University Department of Psychology researcher Ivy Brooker explained.

Considering how dependent infants are on reliable sources of information for learning, this may not be so surprising after all. A baby needs to learn about the world, and she needs to learn from the best teacher possible. Infants are not only actively learning at such a young age, they are choosing who to learn from.

So, next time you contemplate playfully tricking your baby, think twice, they might just deem you untrustworthy!