I recognize that when an infant keeps dropping the stuffed animal or flinging the strained peas or whatever, that infant is likely just being a careful empiricist, probing the nearby grown-up’s response to determine how many drops or flings or whatever it takes for the grown-up to lose it.
However, I would have thought that gathering approximately 12 years of data on a particular grown-up might leave an approximately 12-year-old kid in a position to draw some conclusions. Perhaps these aren’t conclusive conclusions (what with the problem of induction and all), but they’re probably good enough to draw predictions about likely responses to certain kinds of behavior.
All of which leads me to believe that a 12-year-old engaging in a behavior that has reliably elicited a strong negative parental response is not being empirically thorough so much as bloody-minded.
I’m sure this line of speculation is entirely hypothetical, of course.
It’s because you couldn’t help but laugh that time when she flung the peas.
Hey, we can’t be sure Evolution is right if there is any small debate about any piece of the details or mechanisms, right? The slightest doubt means we have to revert to treating Evolution as no better than any other idea, right?
I mean, if that’s good enough for our schools, shouldn’t that general idea be good enough for our schoolchildren? Any slight variance in any small piece of anything clearly invalidates any previous general conclusions, so we can never really learn anything. Or something.
You’re assuming that the child gets nothing out of your strong negative response. Based on what you say about your situation this is not the case. The kid might not even consciously like your response (although they quite possibly might!), but they definitely get rewarded on some psychic level. If you are really interested in stopping the behavior you have to take this in to account and change your response, the environment that leads to the behavior, or (best) both.
Back in the day, “changing the environment”: “You are off to military school!” Oh, look. That changed the response, too.
My theory is that they are collecting data to calculate local values for g.
Perhaps the child has determined that the benefits of the behavior outweigh the detriments of the parental response, to which they may be mostly indifferent.
Yes, sort of like Tom Sawyer saying (and I paraphrase from memory) “I know I’d get licked for it–but what’s a licking, anyways.”
And when they become older teens, they set up scenarios, and watch with mild amusement as you stumble yet again through a stimulus-response experiment of their devising.
Then they roll their eyes and smile with indulgent tolerance as you struggle to find out what just happened.
I thought this particular sort of bloody-mindedness is evolutionary advantageous; how will the young of the species win independence from their parents without making certain that the parents want them gone? Fundamentally, your 12-year-old is being no more evil than a wolf running down a deer; they’re both just doing what they’ve evolved to do.
Of course, it’s hard enough to remember such things, even when they’re in their early empiricist phase.