Are 4 year olds smarter than Harvard graduate students? [Archive]

mroels

03-02-2006, 01:18 AM

(Slight psychology content) The two posts about riddles got me thinking about this email I read a while back about a study that was done by Harvard psychology students. Essentially 400 1st graders and 400 Harvard MBA students were presented with the same riddle and given 1 hour to figure it out. Apparently the 1st graders (85% solved it) had no problem figuring it out but the Havard kids did (27% solved). Unfortunatly the email i got was more about the riddle rather than the research...so I ask why were the results what they were?

Here's the riddle:
What is kinder than God, more evil than the Devil, the rich need it, the poor have it, and if you eat it you'll die?

Solve it and post your answer in white, and explain why kids would have an easier time solving this riddle.

Lestat

03-02-2006, 01:27 AM

I can think of "nothing" kinder than God, more evil than the devil, that rich need, poor have, and if you eat it you will die

mroels

03-02-2006, 01:40 AM

Took me 4 hrs...took you 9 mins...i'm dumb

bisonbison

03-02-2006, 02:19 AM

Answer in red at the end of this sentence.

I think your email is wrong.

r3vbr

03-02-2006, 03:11 AM

Because only very stupid people can answer very stupid questions.

Lestat

03-02-2006, 03:20 AM

[ QUOTE ]
Took me 4 hrs...took you 9 mins...i'm dumb

[/ QUOTE ]

Ah, but I very often have the mentality of a 4 yr old. Just ask my gf.

madnak

03-02-2006, 05:03 AM

Nothing.

madnak

03-02-2006, 05:06 AM

I think the education system generally teaches people to think in rigid, specific patterns. I would not be surprised if the study is true. I have known many smart people who couldn't think "laterally" if their lives depended on it. They needed to follow the processes they had learned from educational authorities.

It may sound radical, but I really believe the education system (particularly the public education system) is designed to prevent people from thinking for themselves.

mroels

03-02-2006, 05:52 AM

[ QUOTE ]
I think the education system generally teaches people to think in rigid, specific patterns. I would not be surprised if the study is true. I have known many smart people who couldn't think "laterally" if their lives depended on it. They needed to follow the processes they had learned from educational authorities.

It may sound radical, but I really believe the education system (particularly the public education system) is designed to prevent people from thinking for themselves.

[/ QUOTE ]

While I agree with what you say I actually want to go deeper and think about why the answer to the riddle made the statements in the riddle axioms to these children. What is the reasoning pattern that older more intelligent (gross assumption) cannot make the same deductions to find the answer as fast.

Basically what i'm getting at is why can't older educated people who were trained to think, analyse, rationalise, conclude etc ever accept that simplicity can be right sometimes. Because essentially it was, imho, the fact that the kids were able to complicate the riddle that they could find the answer so quickly. And when I think back about when I tried to solve this riddle, I made it far to complicated even though I essentially knew that I should think like a kid to solve this one.

Also could it be psychological? e.g. I'm an intelligent person and therefore these must be serious questions with logical, complicated, intellectually challenging answers?

madnak

03-02-2006, 07:28 AM

Well, there are certain elements of context that we understand and kids don't. For example, my immediate assumption was that "kinder than God" and "more evil than the Devil" were hyperbolic. Many riddles I've come across have bigger "holes" than that, so it seemed like a reasonable assumption.

For a child, they may have a more literal understanding and so the instant they see "what is kinder than God" they may (if properly indoctrinated) immediately come to the proper conclusion. There's still a bit of a hump to get over in terms of the general assumption that such questions have concrete answers, but it might be a shorter process.

Still, this isn't so difficult as far as riddles go, and the Harvard students had a full hour to solve it. I'm not sure "making it more complicated" is sufficient to explain their failure. I would imagine they generally got stuck on some specific train of thought and suffered a kind of mental paralysis.

Alex-db

03-02-2006, 12:26 PM

The study could quite possibly be biased. My thought process began.. "what is potentially kinder than this ficitonal 'God' character, and more evil than this 'devil' character.?" I was trying to think of other characters, metaphors, mythologies etc.

If these were brainwashed US kids, they may have instantly questioned whether anything could be kinder than God or more evil than the devil.

I assume there is likely to be a high percentage of atheists at Harvard due to higher intelligence generally, so this thought process probably applied to them.

microbet

03-02-2006, 01:42 PM

answer is obviously nothing 

Harvard kids didn't get it because they were a bunch of boneheaded MBA students.

Borodog

03-02-2006, 02:03 PM

[ QUOTE ]
(Slight psychology content) The two posts about riddles got me thinking about this email I read a while back about a study that was done by Harvard psychology students. Essentially 400 1st graders and 400 Harvard MBA students were presented with the same riddle and given 1 hour to figure it out. Apparently the 1st graders (85% solved it) had no problem figuring it out but the Havard kids did (27% solved). Unfortunatly the email i got was more about the riddle rather than the research...so I ask why were the results what they were?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm afraid I'm very close to crying bull [censored] on this. Citation? This sounds more like an urban myth than an actual study anyone would bother to do. I could be wrong though, you can get a federal grant to study all kinds of stupid [censored] nowadays.

mindflayer

03-02-2006, 02:36 PM

As we get older, we become more socially biased in our answers.
Riddle.
A beggar had a brother who died, but the
brother who died did not have any brothers.
How can this be?

mindflayer

03-02-2006, 02:46 PM

I also had this party game I used to play called
crossed/uncrossed.
players would sit in a circle and take a pair of
scissors and pass them around the circle from one
player to the next. Everyone was allowed to watch
as the scissors were passed. Player A would open
the scissors/ or turn them over and hand them by
the blades or flip them .. and then pass them.
The job was to determine if the scissors were passed
crossed or uncrossed.
The more intelligent the person the more focused
they would become. Using that focus
like an olympic athelete, would allow the person to
block out all other information. This would
guarantee that the person would not be able
to solve the code.
Man was that a fun game.

ChoicestHops

03-02-2006, 02:50 PM

Nothing. Took me about 30 seconds. Keep it simple: God is the extreme of goodness and the Devil is the extreme of evil so nothing is more extreme than the two of those.

IsaacW

03-02-2006, 02:52 PM

There is no answer to the riddle. "Nothing" is likely the answer the kids came up with, but not all of the statements made about "it" are true.
The kids get it because they do not realize that at least one of the statements about the answer, "the poor have it," is not actually a true statement about the answer. This is a poorly constructed riddle with no real answer, there is little chance that this was actually the focus of an academic study. These kinds of e-mails, like the Red Hammer e-mail or the "I love you, send this to 50 people you love in 10 minutes or God will strike you down with Fire and Brimstone" e-mail, are a virus on society that destroy countless hours of productivity at workplaces around the globe.

mroels

03-02-2006, 03:14 PM

[ QUOTE ]
These kinds of e-mails, are a virus on society that destroy countless hours of productivity at workplaces around the globe.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good thing I don't work behind a computer.

Bork

03-02-2006, 03:29 PM

[ QUOTE ]
As we get older, we become more socially biased in our answers.
Riddle.
A beggar had a brother who died, but the
brother who died did not have any brothers.
How can this be?

[/ QUOTE ]

answer:
 beggar is female

_TKO_

03-02-2006, 03:38 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Riddle.
A beggar had a brother who died, but the
brother who died did not have any brothers.
How can this be?

[/ QUOTE ]

Sexist.

_TKO_

03-02-2006, 03:39 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Are 4 year olds smarter than Harvard graduate students?

[/ QUOTE ]

Between now and that day that each dies, a four-year-old will learn a lot more than a Harvard graduate. Does this make the four-year-old smarter?

Zygote

03-02-2006, 03:46 PM

nothing

CallMeIshmael

03-02-2006, 04:12 PM

Ive been told that 3rd graders are better at completing this pattern than those with PhDs:

A___EF_HI_KLM....
_BCD__G__J

Complete the alphabet with each letter appearing in either the top or bottom row

EDIT: underscores just there to aid with spacing, they have no affect on the problem

mroels

03-02-2006, 04:28 PM

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Are 4 year olds smarter than Harvard graduate students?

[/ QUOTE ]

Between now and that day that each dies, a four-year-old will learn a lot more than a Harvard graduate. Does this make the four-year-old smarter?

[/ QUOTE ]

It is an excellent question but i have to say no.

No I don't think this has anything to do with being smart but rather the access to information. Obviously 4-yr-olds right will have far greater access to information that I did. But this does not garauntee them to become smarter, they merely have the potential to become smarter.

Take my 14 year old cousin for example, he doesn't know anything about anything. Ask him simple stuff like what the UN stands for, or what who the Secretary of State and he won't know. But his excuse is that he can find out within 10 minutes by looking it up on the internet.

Ofcourse this does not constitute intelligence because no thought process will go into looking up information. For example, if I were to ask him what the effects of increased interest rates will do to the economy he'll be able to tell me the answer within 10mins but he won't understand why it happens. And without understanding the process he will never be able to add on to any theories. Essentially he'll only be able to mimic information but never be able develop his own information through creative thinking

microbet

03-02-2006, 04:55 PM

Beggar is a girl. Harvard MBAs still might not get it.

madnak

03-02-2006, 05:06 PM

ANOPEFQHIRKLM
SBCDTUGVWJXYZ

The beggar riddle actually got me. Disturbing.

CallMeIshmael

03-02-2006, 05:21 PM

[ QUOTE ]
ANOPEFQHIRKLM
SBCDTUGVWJXYZ

[/ QUOTE ]

I think you misunderstood the question

The alphabet is going in order, and you have to just put the following letters in either the up or the down spot.

For example, the problem could have been:

A___EF
_BCD

And the next entry is 'G' on the top row.

(again, the underscores are simply because you cant put a space in there with the 2p2 code)

madnak

03-02-2006, 05:42 PM

[ QUOTE ]
I think you misunderstood the question

The alphabet is going in order, and you have to just put the following letters in either the up or the down spot.

For example, the problem could have been:

A___EF
_BCD

And the next entry is 'G' on the top row.

[/ QUOTE ]

But the 'G' is in the bottom row in the original problem.

I think I understand what you're getting at now, but it still seems rather vague. I'm assuming that the goal is to identify the a pattern and extend that pattern? Since these riddles are tricky, you'll need to explicitly validate that.

Based on the stated criterion, "complete the alphabet with each letter appearing in either the top or bottom row," the below sequence:

A___EF_HI_KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
_BCD__G__J

Is a correct answer. As to a specific pattern, I'm working on it.

madnak

03-02-2006, 05:48 PM

Oh dear. Tell me this isn't it:

A___EF_HI_KLMN_____T_VWXYZ
_BCD__G__J____OPQRS_U

dragon14

03-02-2006, 06:46 PM

This story sounded contrived so I did some research. Research (http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/harveyriddle.html) The story is repeated with Stanford students, college seniors, kindergartners etc., throughout the web.

Also first graders are generally older than 4 years old.

Unoriginalname

03-02-2006, 09:42 PM

I'm not going to bother typing it out cause I'm lazy, but letters with no curves like "A" and "E" on top; letters with curves like "C" and "P" on the bottom.

AJFenix

03-02-2006, 09:44 PM

The Jackson Five

purnell

03-02-2006, 10:17 PM

Max Weinberg

03-02-2006, 11:13 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Oh dear. Tell me this isn't it:

A___EF_HI_KLMN_____T_VWXYZ
_BCD__G__J____OPQRS_U

[/ QUOTE ]
Yep.

PastorDavidDD

03-02-2006, 11:49 PM

There is no correct answer because the riddle is flawed (rich still have needs, and poor have more than nothing). More Harvard students may have understood that. The one who made up the riddle probably thought the correct answer was "nothing" and mistakenly credited more 1st graders with that "correct" answer.

dragon14

03-03-2006, 12:33 AM

In case people missed my post up above. This never happened (http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/n/nothing-harvey.htm)

CallMeIshmael

03-03-2006, 01:21 AM

[ QUOTE ]
Oh dear. Tell me this isn't it:

A___EF_HI_KLMN_____T_VWXYZ
_BCD__G__J____OPQRS_U

[/ QUOTE ]

/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Hobbs.

03-03-2006, 03:37 AM

[ QUOTE ]
Harvard kids didn't get it because they were a bunch of boneheaded MBA students.

[/ QUOTE ]
this is the correct answer

MatthewRyan

03-03-2006, 04:11 AM

evolvedForm

03-03-2006, 01:50 PM

Nothing.

12AX7

03-03-2006, 07:25 PM

I think the reason is that all our lives we are give tests where a concrete answer is expected. "Nothing" is an answer that you'd only give, after years of such testing, when you give up.

Now if it had been multiple choice, and "e. none of the above" were available, the trained monkeys (Harvard guys) might have actually scored on par. LOL!

In essence the answer to this lies in our education conditioning.

And, as one poster points out, he believes that education is designed to make you *not* think for yourself.

Actually there is some correctness in that assertion. History shows that many early industrialists got involved in the education system. That's why it has bells to signal class changes and whatnot... to indoctrinate worker bees to a production line mentality.

That is to say, the richy riches tweaked public education to make trained factory workers.