My daughter is ridiculously charming. She has learnt (I don’t know where) to answer questions with slightly widened eyes, saying “I don’t know!” as if she is genuinely surprised not to know whatever it is. It is SO CUTE that even I fell for it for a while, until I realised she was just being lazy. I have now told her she’s not allowed to say that when I ask her something. Good social engineering for password elicitation, though.
The thing that really gets me about this sort of scenario is that she may well have learned it from you. It’s astonishing how quickly even small differences in reward can shape behavior, and it’s very easy for the system being rewarded to be far more attuned to those differences than the system doing the rewarding.
This isn’t even an exclusively human thing… I regularly have similar revelations about my dog, who is I’m sure much less charming than your daughter but nevertheless does OK.
Good on you for eventually recognizing the pattern and not further rewarding the behavior you don’t want.
My daughter is ridiculously charming. She has learnt (I don’t know where) to answer questions with slightly widened eyes, saying “I don’t know!” as if she is genuinely surprised not to know whatever it is. It is SO CUTE that even I fell for it for a while, until I realised she was just being lazy. I have now told her she’s not allowed to say that when I ask her something. Good social engineering for password elicitation, though.
Yes.
The thing that really gets me about this sort of scenario is that she may well have learned it from you. It’s astonishing how quickly even small differences in reward can shape behavior, and it’s very easy for the system being rewarded to be far more attuned to those differences than the system doing the rewarding.
This isn’t even an exclusively human thing… I regularly have similar revelations about my dog, who is I’m sure much less charming than your daughter but nevertheless does OK.
Good on you for eventually recognizing the pattern and not further rewarding the behavior you don’t want.
Almost certainly! But I bet she does it at nursery and they haven’t picked up yet that she’s being lazy …