They eventually receive evaluative feedback from their teachers and start to experience a greater variety of negative relational experiences, like bullying.Įven so, children often remain stubbornly optimistic despite contrary evidence. They begin to see differences in performance among people, including their peers, and this gives them a sense of where they stand in relation to others. With age, children are exposed to harsher realities. ![]() It’s likely due in part to the positive social experiences that most children are lucky enough to have early in life. Psychologists don’t know for sure why kids are so optimistic. Karl Fredrickson/Unsplash, CC BY Why do we start life with rose-colored glasses? Children even track people’s records of accuracy to decide whether they can be trusted as learning sources for things like the names of unknown objects.Įverything’s new, everything’s great. Even preschoolers can tell the difference between experts and non-experts, and they understand that different kinds of experts know different things – like how doctors know how human bodies work and mechanics know how cars work. For example, children understand that animate objects, such as animals, operate very differently from inanimate objects, such as chairs. ![]() In early childhood, they carefully gather data from their environment to construct theories about the world. In many ways, children are sophisticated thinkers. Psychologists like me investigate this optimism that seems to emerge very early in life to figure out more about how it works – and how and why it eventually decreases over time. And in an era of “fake news” and myriad informational sources, it’s more important than ever to raise strong critical thinkers who will grow into adults who make informed life decisions. Why does it matter if children see the world through rose-colored glasses? Children who are overly optimistic may unwittingly find themselves in unsafe situations, or they may be unable or unwilling to learn from constructive feedback. They often show a positivity bias: a tendency to focus on positive actions or selectively process information that promotes positive judgments about the self, others, or even animals and objects. Young children are strikingly less cautious when making character judgments. Most adults would probably want to see how a stranger acts in several different circumstances, to decide whether someone new is nice, mean or trustworthy. You might hesitate to make a character judgment about someone based on a first encounter.
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