Speaking of Psychology: Kids and psychologists team up to learn from one another, with Peter Blake, EdD

In order to understand how children think and behave, psychologists need to study them. Most of the time, these experiments take place in university labs or sometime in schools, but one program is taking psychological science into museums around the country. In this episode, Peter Blake, EdD, talks about the Living Laboratory and how it’s breaking down barriers between scientists and the public.

Peter Blake is an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Social Development and Learning Lab at Boston University. He is also a longtime Living Laboratoryopens in new window collaborator. He studies how children learn to become cooperative members of society. Specifically, he uses experiments to investigate children’s altruism, fairness and other social behaviors in different cultures. He is also extending projects to different cultures in order to look for common developmental patterns and assess cultural variables that influence cooperation.

Blake earned his doctorate in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and then held a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University.

Audrey Hamilton: Going to therapy is probably one of the most common ways the average person sees a psychologist at work. Some museums are trying to change that. A program called the Living Laboratory is breaking down the barriers between psychological scientists and the public by having museum visitors and their children see and participate in actual, psychological experiments and it’s become a learning experience for the participants and the scientists.

I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is Speaking of Psychology.

Peter Blake is an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Social Development and Learning Lab at Boston University. He studies how children learn to become cooperative members of society, specifically he uses experiments to investigate children’s altruism, fairness and other social behaviors in different cultures. Over the last 10 years, he’s worked to bring the lab to the general public by collaborating with the Boston Museum of Science’s part of the Living Laboratory, a nation-wide program aimed to help grown-ups understand children’s development by immersing museum visitors in the process of scientific discovery. Welcome, Dr. Blake.

Peter Blake: Hello.

Audrey Hamilton: Let’s talk about the Living Laboratory at the Museum of Science. From what I understand, psychologists are working in museums conducting experiments with volunteers. It’s fascinating. What was the idea behind this project and how does it work?

Peter Blake: Researchers in the Boston area, there’s a lot of psychology labs around here, we were interested in where we could get subjects, particularly developmental psychologists are always looking for new populations of children or access to children’s family that we can test. And the Museum of Science was interested in having scientists come into the museum and explain what they’re doing to parents and their children as well. So, about 10 years ago at this point, there was a meeting of the minds and we agreed to start doing research at this one area at the Museum of Science in Boston. And, this, over several years, this grew into this more formal program that is specifically about, not just about us collecting data, but also about scientists engaging in education with the public. So it is kind of like a research-education collaborative and we’ve developed this and it became more clearly defined, and now there’s shared value system that we have and have been working with the Museum of Science. So, I can go more into detail on some of that, if you’d like.

Audrey Hamilton: Yeah, I mean the psychological experiments—they appear to be a good fit for these types of venues – and you’ve conducted, like you said, research in these museums. Can you tell us about those experiments and what you found?

Peter Blake: Yeah, absolutely. We do things, we have to design our experiments specifically for this kind of environment, but in the museum environment, it’s actually quite similar to running experiments in preschools or in elementary schools. This is something that developmental psychologists have done for generations, so this is standard practice. But we don’t run the studies for an hour long, for example, that is kind of rare. We have to be sensitive to the fact that parents are there with their kids. They want to get some experience. They are interested in the science of what we’re doing. Here’s an opportunity for their kids to do an experiment and it’ll only take, maybe 10 minutes. So it is a very safe way for parents to get engaged in the process. Parents are always interested in how their kids are thinking and how they behave. So this is something that they’re eager to participate in.

The kinds of experiments that I’ve been doing, specifically, kids really enjoy them because they usually get some sort of prize as part of the task. For altruism, for example, we’ll give kids a set of stickers and will tell them that you can keep them all for yourself or you can give some to another child. This basic set-up is referred to as the Dictator Game when it is done by economists and the idea is that the child gets to act as a dictator. They get to make a decision about what they’re going to get and what this other child is going to get. Giving is costly so this is a behavior that has some consequences for them. This works really well with the Museum of Science where we can do this quickly and we’ve been able to compare the results there to what we get at the lab, what we get in schools and in other settings. So far, everything looks very consistent. So that’s one very simple, basic game and what we’ve done over time, once we establish that children, the basic result that, children who are younger than six years of age keep more for themselves in that setup in a baseline and then they tend to approach giving an equal split as they get closer to six, seven, and eight.

Audrey Hamilton: Hmm.

Peter Blake: So what we’ve done with that and what other researchers now do quite regularly, we use that giving measure as our dependent variable, so we’ll do an experimental manipulation before that, our different conditions, and see if we can increase or decrease children’s giving. So that way we can study what are the factors that help children engage in more altruistic behavior and what can depress it as well.

Audrey Hamilton: I’m sure a lot of parents find that very interesting, I mean they want to know how to make a child a more giving child, a more kind child, maybe a more empathetic child. How do they react when you get them involved, them and their children? You know, what do they get out of this experience?

Peter Blake: So that’s one of the great things about this environment is that we recruit the parents right there, we get their consent, the child participates and in our setup, the parents can watch what the child does and we ask them not to interfere, obviously. And then we talk to them right afterwards about what just happened, and for the altruism games, children are often quite selfish and parents are often a little bit surprised or embarrassed, but at least it brings great conversation about how this is pretty typical and we always have to consider that we can make this prediction for your particular child but we do have a general sense of what are the factors that can cause children to be more altruistic under different conditions. And we also have an opportunity to explain a bit of the science to the parents. So we’ll typically run our conditions as between-subjects conditions and that just means that children only receive one experimental manipulation. So parents who are watching this, just see that their child did a search task or something before this. Now well, isn’t that the thing that is driving the effect and I’m like well, we can only tell that if we compare it to a control condition, where they’re doing some other kind of task. So it gives us a chance to explain to the parents what our science is all about.

Audrey Hamilton: I guess this leads us to my next question, it sounds like it’s not only educational for the parents, even maybe some of the children, but for you, the researchers. You know, you’re out of the control laboratory setting, you’re in a dynamic setting. What are the advantages of that?

Peter Blake: Yeah, this has been a real learning experience for everyone who has been involved in the Learning Lab project. And one of the benefits to the researchers, kind of initially and unexpected benefit and a bit of a challenge, was that we were forced to really find ways to explain our studies to parents and to other people who are present quickly, clearly, truthfully and accurately. This is something where the researchers worked with the educators at the Museum of Science, we learned a lot from them. This is what they do. They’re like, “OK, if you explain your study to me, I’ll give you advice on how you might want to present it to the public.” And that helps take the jargon out of it and present things in a clear way with examples. So that’s been one of the benefits and now we’ve pushed it down, I have my graduate students go and run this, and as part of it, they have to come up with written explanations. Often a parent just wants to hear the two-second version and that’s fine, but you’ll have to be able to say like: “so this is what we’re doing, this is what we found in the past, that’s great, see you later.” Butthen another parent will say: “Well, tell me more.” So now you have a three-minute version and this will expand to different levels of discussion. Each of those levels of communication each have to be correct, so this is often a bit of a challenge. One of the ways that the museum help us do is that they create handouts. It’s just a two-side small thing that we can hand out to parents that say this is what it’s about, this is what we found in the past, and here are some things that you can try at home, to play around with this idea with your own child. These aren’t things, what you do at home, not something I usually think about, so it really challenges us to come up with ways to convey why this is important and interesting.

Audrey Hamilton: Do you think it’s getting psychology and the idea of psychology as a science out there to the general public as well?

Peter Blake: One way we convey that it’s a science is by explaining that this is an experiment with different conditions. That seems to impress on people that we’re doing something scientific. This sounds rather silly but something that we mention is that yes, we run statistics to determine whether there’s a real effect and just adding the math piece seems to give some legitimacy, like oh, okay, you’re not just reading some people’s dreams, you know, and interpreting them. You actually have quantitative measures and you’re doing math. That’s used to impress upon people like: “Oh okay, then that might be a science then.”

Audrey Hamilton: Well, it seems to be doing really well. There are more than 25 Living Laboratories in museums across the country, I mean what does the future look like with these types of programs?

Peter Blake: It has really grown rapidly due to a large NSF (National Science Foundation) grant that the Museum of Science got to spread this, and it is spread beyond the 25 Living Laboratories and a lot of other research labs have set up their own independent and explored independent connections with museums as well. And to give you one striking example, one of my colleagues started doing this work with the Museum of Science, Andrew Baron who’s at the University of British Columbia, when he moved up there, he set up his own relationship with the Museum of Vancouver. He told us he’s been testing thousands of kids a year. So it’s a real—I don’t like to say gold mine as that emphasizes the data collection aspect—but it’s been a very beneficial and productive relationship for both sides, I think.

Audrey Hamilton: Well great, Dr. Blake, this has been very fascinating. Thanks so much for joining us.

Peter Blake: Thank you.

Audrey Hamilton: Thanks for listening. To hear more episodes, and to learn more about the Living Laboratory, please go to our website. With the American Psychological Association’s Speaking of Psychology, I’m Audrey Hamilton.