![]() ![]() In a sense, this is just the way things work in research. However, I want to be fair here to the researchers in Babies and to the broader scientific community in general. ![]() There will perpetually be an invisible wind sending your arrow toward the bullseye it may drift off-target every now and then, but you sure as hell want it to land properly when all is said and done. If the conclusion is drawn before the search begins, it’s only inevitable that each step in the middle is guided toward that end. This bullseye prioritizes certainty over curiosity places the destination over the journey. If you are depending on “A” to be your answer, then that bright bullseye will be there to remind you of this every step of the way. This is when you already have a preferred target in mind, a conclusion that you want your inquiry to eventually reach. I like to think of this as painting the bullseye before the search for truth even begins. At one point in the documentary, one of the researchers even says (after a “successful” experiment) that “the fantastic thing about these results was the confirmation of our initial hypothesis.” Environmental conditions will be designed so that “A” is almost guaranteed to emerge as the answer, and everyone is expecting that as well. In a truly open-ended, curiosity-driven search for the truth, the breadth of potential answers looks like this:īut when you frame your question in the way the above researchers did, your potential answers look like this:Īs you can imagine, there will be quite an expectation for “A” to be the answer here.įraming a search to see “whether or not “A” is true” narrows down the field of exploration so narrowly to that single variable, and that will impact the entire way you structure that search. A more expectation-free question would be something like, “What happens when a baby develops a bond with its parents?” In fact, it would be quite surprising if a good relationship didn’t help the baby in this way. The researcher here was setting up her inquiry so that a good parental relationship was already expected to be a stress coping mechanism for babies. 2 To further clarify this, we can look at the last quoted question as an example. In other words, the study’s hypothesis didn’t just form the inquiry, it also contained the answer they hoped for as well. By framing their reasoning as a “whether or not” scenario, almost all of them already had an expected outcome embedded into the question they wanted to explore. While these statements sound benign on their surface, there’s a sneaky sleight-of-hand that is being performed with each of them. “Does a good relationship between the parent and a baby help the baby cope with stress?” “Is actually continuous, little by little, as we all assume it is?” ![]() Or this one about the trajectory of infant height: “Was the crawling that we saw in the newborn already controlled with something in the brain?” It is here where the frustrating pattern would emerge.Ĭonsider this statement from a researcher that wanted to study the brain’s influence on crawling: 1 All quotes below are verbatim from the series. After a somewhat lengthy introduction of the individual and why he or she became interested in science, the researcher would then go on to talk about the study, and what their initial motivations were for putting the study together. Fortunately, it had nothing to do with the babies (who were all cute bundles of joy – they’re the best), and everything to do with the grown-ups that were being interviewed for the project.Įach episode featured a few neuroscientists that conducted relevant studies in the subject at hand. ![]() The series as a whole is fairly informative, but there was an odd pattern I was catching with each episode that made it an increasingly frustrating watch. Each episode focuses on a specific milestone of an infant’s life (such as crawling, walking, etc.), and aims to explain the neurological and psychological mechanisms that drive each of them. My wife and I recently finished a documentary series called Babies, which explores the first year of life in our favorite kind of human. ![]()
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