Children's evolved cues to promote caregiving: Are voices more powerful than thoughts in signaling young children's attributes and needs to adults?

Abstract

Children have evolved “psychological weapons” to endear them to adults, enhancing their chances of surviving. Earlier research has shown that, during early childhood, caregivers feel positively attracted by children's vocal and cognitive cues of immaturity, which in turn provide adults with information about children's attributes and needs. The purpose of this study was to disentangle which of these two cues (vocal or cognitive), if either, might be more relevant for adults in assessing children's attributes and needs. College students (n = 273) listened to four pairs of children reasoning either in a mature or an immature manner about two types of thinking, one we labeled supernatural that reflects “magical thinking” (e.g., “The sun's not out because it's mad”) and the other we labeled natural that reflects abilities such as estimating one's cognition abilities or inhibition (e.g., “I can remember all the words you showed me”). In one condition (Consistent), the immaturity/maturity of children's reasoning matched the immaturity/maturity of their voices, whereas in the other condition (Inconsistent) they did not. Results revealed that, regardless of the type of reasoning, children's vocal cues prevailed over cognitive cues for assessing attributes of positive affect and helplessness. Conversely, children's cognitive cues prevailed over vocal cues for assessing intelligence (but only for supernatural thinking), and negative affect (but only for natural thinking). The results reveal natural selection's use of different cues of immaturity to promote caregiving during early childhood and reflect the complexity of multimodal features when adults evaluate young children.