Are 4 year olds smarter than Harvard graduate students?

mroels · #1 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 · #2 03-02-2006, 01:27 AM

<font color="white">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 </font>

mroels · #3 03-02-2006, 01:40 AM

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

bisonbison · #4 03-02-2006, 02:19 AM

Answer in red at the end of this sentence.

I think your email is wrong.

r3vbr · #5 03-02-2006, 03:11 AM

Because only very stupid people can answer very stupid questions.

Lestat · #6 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 · #7 03-02-2006, 05:03 AM

<font color="white">Nothing.</font>

madnak · #8 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 · #9 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 · #10 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.