Dolls vs. Tablets: What's Better For Children
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What if there's a secret to raising emotionally intelligent humans? And it's not an app, a tablet, or a fancy educational game, but a humble plastic doll. New research shows that old-fashioned playing with dolls might teach kids better social skills than technology. Let's dive into that with developmental psychologist at Cardiff University in Wales, Sarah Gerson. Sarah, welcome into the program.
Thank you for having me.
When I hear Barbie dolls are great for your brain, a part of me thinks it's a clever marketing campaign. Let's start here. What did you set out to test?
How do dolls contribute to children's social skills development?
And tell me a little bit about what you found.
Yeah, it's interesting because I think Barbies are often kind of villainized in some ways. But the idea is that parents often think of dolls as kind of just for fun or sometimes even as negative. And I study social cognition. So kind of how do we understand other people? How do we interact with other people and learn from them? And I thought dolls actually are a good case where we might be able to kind of practice those social skills that we use in an interaction. with another person there or sometimes even without another person there. So we were interested in whether there are these kinds of social benefits of dolls when kids naturally play with them. So that was our initial goal.
What research supports the benefits of doll play for children?
And we started a series of studies about this about six or seven years ago now. So this is the newest kind of piece of it.
I didn't have a doll growing up, or I guess I had some stuffed animals, but my blanket I used to have deep conversations with. And maybe that's why I'm socialized so well. Let's define something here, something called theory of mind. Now, I've heard about it before, but for someone who hasn't heard that phrase, what does it mean and what does it mean when it comes to child development?
Yeah.
Yeah, so in developmental psychology, we refer to theory of mind as kind of a set of skills that helps us understand other people. So it's a theory about what's happening inside someone else's mind. And the way that we test this, we can test it in a variety of ways, but oftentimes it's about thinking about the fact that someone else might think, believe, know or want something different from what we ourselves think, believe, know or want. And as adults, sometimes that's really natural. Some adults still struggle with this. But particularly in children, we see kind of this development in those early kind of elementary school primary years where children are starting to learn that, oh, they might think something different from me and they might use that to kind of like play tricks on other people.
or they might learn it, use it to kind of learn about other people and interact with them better.
I might call that empathy. You might take issue with me labeling it like that. Maybe that's an oversimplification.
I think within the field that's controversial, but I think it's closely related to empathy for sure.
So enter dolls, enter playing with tablets and technology. What teaches a kid a better theory of mind or what did you find in your research?
So I think an important thing to caveat is that we used creative play on tablets as our kind of control or comparison case in this research. We're not villainizing tablets in any way in this particular scope. What we did is we were interested in whether there's a causal effect of doll play. So when children are prompted to play with dolls and we give them some dolls to go home and play with for about a month, do they then change their understanding about other people? And is that changed relative to children who were sent home with tablets? And so we wanted to know, do dolls improve children's understanding of other people's mental states? And that's what we found here was that four to eight year old, both girls and boys, when they were sent home with a set of dolls and told, play with these a few times a week, however you want to play.
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