Chennai: When a baby picks a particular toy from a cabin filled with many other similar stuff, s/he has likely just decided s/he doesn’t like what s/he didn’t choose.
A new study says that this phenomenon demonstrates that this way of justifying choice is intuitive and somehow fundamental to the human experience. The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have long known that adults build unconscious biases over a lifetime of making choices between things that are essentially the same.
According to the study’s co-author Alex Silver, a former Johns Hopkins undergraduate who’s now a graduate student in cognitive psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, “even infants who are really just at the start of making choices for themselves have this bias.”
Co-author Lisa Feigenson, a Johns Hopkins cognitive scientist specialising in child development, said, “I chose this, so I must like it. I didn’t choose this other thing, so it must not be so good. Adults make these inferences unconsciously.” Lisa added: “We justify our choice after the fact.”
The team brought 10- to 20-month-old babies into the lab and gave them a choice of objects to play with: two equally bright and colourful soft blocks.
They set each block far apart, so the babies had to crawl to one or the other—a random choice.
After the baby chose one of the toys, the researchers took it away and came back with a new option. The babies could then pick from the toy they didn’t play with the first time, or a brand-new toy.
“The babies reliably chose to play with the new object rather than the one they had previously not chosen, as if they were saying, ‘Hmm, I didn’t choose that object last time, I guess I didn’t like it very much,” Feigenson stated.