To really sell your completely trusting offspring on utter misinformation for your own amusement (or, let’s say, science), you need to maintain eye contact:
Topal’s team tested this explanation by performing the hiding test with three groups of ten-month-olds. For one group, the adult tester sat at right-angles and made no eye contact or communication with the babies. When the object was finally hidden under a second cup (after being repeatedly hidden and retrieved from a first cup), lo and behold, the babies were far more likely in these conditions to subsequently look for it in the right place (57 per cent of them did so, compared with 14 per cent of babies who were tested under typical conditions involving eye-contact and talk).For the final group, the hiding task was performed with the tester concealed behind a curtain – these babies looked for the object under the second cup 64 per cent of the time.
Topal’s team aren’t saying that inhibition and memory don’t have anything to do with this classic error – after all, even without eye-contact and talk the babies did still sometimes look in the wrong place. However, they say their account has the advantage of explaining why, under usual conditions, babies nearly always look in the wrong place (if they were simply clueless, you’d expect them to look in the correct place at least half the time).
“Human infants are highly social creatures who cannot help but interpret the ostensive communicative signals directed to them,” the researchers wrote. “Although such a disposition prepares them to efficiently learn from adults, in certain situations it can also misguide their performance.”
What an intriguing scrap of information! They don’t mention this in Research Digest, but I’ve conferred with Re:Generator’s crack science team and they’ve given me the go-ahead to issue the following warning. You should only abuse this awesome power intermittently. Otherwise, you run the chance of warping the child into the next John Wayne Gacy or Celine Dion.
