Some “Psychological Weapons” Infants and Young Children Have to Get Others to Love Them

– by Carlos Hernández Blasi and David F. Bjorklund

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that a major theme in evolution is “save the children,” especially for a slow-developing species that invests much in few offspring, such as humans. However, although a child’s survival is in the best interest of both parents and children, ancient parents could not be indiscriminate on how much care and attention they give to any one child. For most of our species’ existence, infant mortality rates were high, with nearly half of all children dying before reaching puberty. It is therefore important for infants and young children to endear themselves to adults, particularly their parents, to insure they get the care they need to survive and thrive. To do so, infants and children have developed methods of communication that change over the course of development, from cries and facial expressions to more sophisticated vocal and cognitive cues. In short, children have evolved a set of “psychological weapons” to attract adults to them and increase the chances that they will receive the care they need to grow up and become adult members of their community.

Infants enter the world with some perceptual, motor, and communication systems that serve to promote their interaction with the people who care for them. For example, although newborns’ eyesight is poor, they see most clearly objects that are about 10 inches in front of them, which is about the distance between mother’s and baby’s faces when nursing. Infants’ cries convey their physical and emotional states to adults, and they come into the world with a number of reflexes that, in the right contexts, promote closeness, such as the sucking and grasping reflexes. Babies also possess some physical facial characteristics that are very appealing to adults, even to those adults who profess not to like babies all that much. These include a large head relative to body size, large eyes relative to head size, a flat nose, high forehead, and rounded cheeks. The Nobel Laurette Konrad Lorenz, referred to these features as Kindchenschema, or baby schema. Nearly 80 years of research has shown that adults and even children generally view babies who possess high levels of “baby schema” as cute and respond affectionately toward them. Thus, although in some sense infants are perceptually, motorically, and cognitively immature, from an evolutionary perspective they can be seen as being quite smart, having some features that get adults to pay attention to them and perhaps to care and love them.

However, babies grow up, and they lose the special “cuteness” afforded by the baby schema. Yet, compared to other mammals, human children are dependent on their caregivers for a remarkably long time, and it would make sense for natural selection to provide children (and adults) with other mechanisms that promote care. This has been the focus of our research for more than a decade, examining some features of early childhood (essentially the preschool age, between about two and six years) that may increase attention to and caring for children beyond infancy. Anthropologists tell us that this is the age when in many traditional societies children are weaned and start to spend more time with people outside the family. Children in this period of life are certainly more autonomous than they were as infants, but they are still unable to feed or otherwise fend for themselves. Might preschool-age children also have some “smart” features that, like the baby schema of infancy, promote their surviving and thriving?

In our first studies, we found that one potential “psychological weapon” of preschool children to keep adults tuned to (and informed about) them involved some of the often humorous things they said, reflecting a form of what we called cognitive immaturity. For example, adults and older adolescents listening to a young child talking about some magical- or supernatural-thinking explanation such as, “The sun is not out today because it’s mad” or “The high mountains are for long walks, and the short mountains are for the short ones,” were viewed not only as funny, but as endearing and signaled that these children still likely needed caring and support. However, not all expressions of cognitive immaturity were viewed positively by adults and older adolescents. When the same children made some immature statements about more mundane topics, such as, “I will remember all 20 cards!” (something typically out of the range of their cognitive skills) or “I couldn’t prevent looking into the box for a while, and I lost the treat!” (exhibiting their difficulty to regulate their actions), adults and older adolescents did not typically react the same way they did to immature supernatural thinking. In fact, we found that children expressing immature natural thinking typically don’t make a positive impression. Rather, adults feel a bit overwhelmed, if not bothered, by this type of cognitive immaturity. In other studies, we found that the typical immature voices of preschool children, regardless of speech content, evoke a similar effect to the funny, supernatural thinking of children, triggering a positive impression in adults and adolescents in general and blocking negative feelings towards them. We also found that preschool children’s faces continue to prompt positive feelings in adults and adolescents, but they were not as powerful as either children’s voices or their verbalized thoughts to inform about children’s intelligence or their vulnerability.

Finally, in our most recent study, we found that, overall, when pitted against one another, young children’s voices prevail over young children’s thinking, in terms of conveying to adults both positive affect and some reliable information about their degree of vulnerability. In contrast, young children’s thinking is apparently more relevant than young children’s voices to inform their potential caregivers about their intelligence level – but only when children verbalize magical or supernatural explanations – and for making negative impressions – but only when they verbalize more realistic or natural narrations. In sum, our studies show that, though young children are still highly dependent on others, “nurture” speaking, they are actually very smart in “nature,” displaying different, possibly evolved cues that keep them connected to those who can help them to survive and thrive in their early development.

Read the original article: Hernández Blasi, C., Bjorklund, D. F., Agut, S., Nomdedeu, F. L., & Martínez, M. Á. (2024). Children’s evolved cues to promote caregiving: Are voices more powerful than thoughts in signaling young children’s attributes and needs to adults? Evolution and Human Behavior, 45(5), 106609.