14 DAY TRIAL // Next time you're about to tell a lie to a kid, think twice as they might know you're not being sincere. A new research has found that children are very similar to adults when it comes to assessing an individual's character traits, as the first impression is also very important to them.
The research, conducted by psychological scientist Emily Cogsdill of Harvard University, shows that children as young as three tend to judge others based on physical features, by simply looking at their face. It seems that they are capable of making judgments on trustworthiness and competence from facial expressions.
So, this predisposition to judge others based on their appearance does not necessarily require years of social experience.
Moreover, the results of the study show that children show remarkable consensus in the assessments they make.
According to Daily Mail, previous studies have shown that adults tend to make judgments about the others just by looking at them, but it wasn't clear if this tendency is due to an impulse that emerges early in life or is a result of life experiences.
“If adult-child agreement in face-to-trait inferences emerges gradually across development, one might infer that these inferences require prolonged social experience to reach an adult-like state,” Emily Cogsdill said.
“Even young children's inferences are like those of adults. This indicates that face-to-trait character inferences are a fundamental social cognitive capacity that emerges early in life,” she added.
Cogsdill's research involved 99 adults and 141 children, aged three to 10. They were asked to evaluate pairs of computer-generated faces that differed on one of three traits – trustworthiness, dominance, and competence, – and to determine which one was nice, for instance.
Unsurprisingly, the evaluations made by the adults largely coincided, as they attributed the same characteristics to specific faces. However, the same was valid for the answers given by children.
Although children aged three to four were slightly less consistent in their judgments than the seven-year-olds, overall, their assessments were in agreement. Also, their answers were more consistent when it came to detecting trustworthy people, compared to the other two traits.
The results suggest that children tend to pay more attention to people's attitude based on their facial expression in order to determine whether it is a positive or a negative one.
However, it's important to note that the study, which appeared in the journal Psychological Science, does not address the question of whether the assessments made by children are accurate inferences of character or not. The study only concentrates on determining whether these inferences require a lengthy social experience or not.