Posts tagged ‘innate’
Praising a Child as “Smart” Can Be Detrimental
We’ve been told for years that praising our children is a good thing; that it builds self-esteem and confidence. It’s almost instinctual to applaud a child as smart when they do something clever. My four year-old just recited the fifty states in alphabetical order (thanks to his nanny’s fondness for the Fifty Nifty United States song) and then proceeded to identify more states than I can on his map puzzle. So I had to bite my tongue not to say “you’re so smart!” or “your memory is amazing!” I’m fighting my ingrained habits of praise because a growing body of research is showing that complementing innate talents such as intellect or athletic ability can have a number of negative consequences. (more…)
Morality: A Matter of Nature and Nurture
In a New York Times magazine feature in May 2010, Yale professor Paul Bloom describes the research on the moral instincts of babies being conducted by his research team at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University. The researchers found that the significant majority of babies as young as 5 months old prefer good (helpful) characters over bad (hindering) ones, moreover babies at 8 months show preference for characters that act justly by either rewarding a good guy, or punishing a bad actor.
However, that is not to say that babies have “moral” preferences in all cases. (more…)
