From the archive: Is a jumper angrier than a tree?

It's been a while since I asked children to reflect on the emotions of jumpers and trees. The work we carried out over 20 years ago challenged previous research within the eyewitness testimony context that found children would respond to nonsensical questions without query or request for clarification.

Our research showed that if questions were phrased such that they only required a 'yes' or 'no' response, children did tend to give one of those two responses. However, if questions were more 'open', e.g., 'What do feet have for breakfast?', children were much more likely to say that it was a silly question or that they didn't understand.

Building on that, we looked at how children (and adults) would respond to sensible questions, about a story or a staged event, but where they did not know the answer to some of the questions. We were interested in what factors would increase or decrease the chance that people would appropriately say when they did not know.

For example, we found that when participants believed an interviewer to be ignorant of what had happened at the event, they were more likely correctly to indicate when they did not know the answer to a particular question.

I do remember that the cover was somewhat controversial at the time! I think some people felt that we were trying somehow to trick children into answering nonsensical questions, which was obviously not our intent. And the Editor tells me some just thought it looked cartoonish or comic. [Editor's note: This did seem to be a recurring problem with illustrating complex psychological concepts at the time.] But asking silly questions has a serious side – how children and adults may approach question-answer exchanges with different understandings and different interpretations about that type of discourse.

In fact, the research was picked up by the Freakonomics team in the US, who were interested in how difficult it can be for adults to admit when they don't know the answer to a question in certain contexts such as board room meetings. That led to a fun radio interview with Stephen Dubner, which culminated in him singing Happy Birthday to my son (a story for another time).

Over the years my research focus has moved from long-term memory to working memory, with a particular interest in the importance of working memory within the classroom. However, I still find myself drawn back to this idea of what people do when they don't know the answer to a question, or don't understand a question. 

Oh, and if you're interested, the consensus was that jumpers are angrier.