Hughes Policeman Doll Study

Have you ever wondered why children sometimes have difficulty accepting that the world around them is composed of people just like them with individual viewpoints, thoughts and feelings? Piaget aimed to find an answer to this in his three mountains study. However, Hughes, another psychologist, argued that the three mountains study was too confusing for young children and wished to devise a simpler study based on the same premise - egocentric thinking in children. Let's take a look at Hughes' 'policeman doll' study and what it tells us about egocentrism in children.

• We will kickstart your learning of the Hughes' 'policeman doll' study by learning about the Hughes policeman doll study aim.
• Then move on swiftly to learn about the procedure used by Hughes, we will also cover Piaget's Three Mountains Task to give you a quick refresher.
• Next, moving along to discuss the Policeman doll study results.
• To finish off we will learn about the Hughes policeman doll study strengths & weaknesses.

A young child accepting their view of the world and not understanding that others view the world differently; this is what Piaget and Hughes call egocentrism, freepik.com/pch.vector

Policeman doll study Experiment

Children and adults clearly have different levels of intelligence. Therefore, it is common sense that psychology research investigating children should tailor tests used towards them. This is what Hughes attempted to do in his policeman doll study in 1975. The psychology concept investigated in Hughes' policeman doll' study is egocentrism in children.

Developmental psychologists have established that young children have lower levels of egocentrism.

Hughes policeman doll study aim

Hughes aimed to analyse egocentric thinking in children. Hughes took several steps to ensure that the task was as simple as possible for children to understand and participate in. Both Hughes and Piaget's investigated essentially the same thing, except that Hughes tailored the procedure to children. The Hughes policeman doll study aimed to identify children's level of egocentrism. Furthermore, if the results found in the study were consistent with Piaget's.

• In Piaget's Three Mountains Task study, children were shown three mountains: one with snow, one with a hut and the third with a Red Cross on it.
• The children were able to move during the study to see the different viewpoints of the mountain.
• A doll was then placed in random locations near the mountain.
• Participants were then shown different pictures and asked to identify which of them showed the dolls' perspective.
• Participants aged four indicated images that showed their perspective rather than the dolls, but children aged over seven could identify the correct image.

Hughes policeman doll study sample

Hughes' 'policeman doll' study recruited 30 children aged between three and a half to five years old.

Therefore, the participants were at the ideal age for Hughes to test Piaget's theory.

Hughes policeman doll study procedure

Hughes carefully ensured that children could easily relate to and understand his study. Instead of the many different parts of the previously mentioned three mountains study, there were just three major components to the policeman doll study. These were a doll representing a young boy and two policeman dolls, and they were to be placed around a set of intersecting lines.

Hughes placed just one policeman doll at first, putting it in different places around the walls. The children were then asked to place the doll in a way that would 'hide' it from the sight of the policeman doll.

This first step acted as a 'trial' to help children understand what they were required to do for the study and for Hughes' to ensure that the participants had correctly understood the task.

After the trial, a second policeman doll was brought into the study. Unlike the introductory step with the singular doll, this required the children to consider the viewpoints of three different subjects: the boy doll and the two policeman dolls. With this added challenge, the children were once again asked to hide the boy, but this time from both policemen.

Hughes' applied the children's game hide-and-seek to the task used in his study to measure egocentrism, flaticon.com/free-icon

Policeman doll study results

Unlike Piaget's three mountains task, the children in Hughes' experiment were easily capable of hiding the boy from the policeman from the age of about four onwards. The four-year-olds were able to successfully hide the boy from the policemen 90% of the time.

The children were so successful at the task, in fact, that measures were even taken to make the test more difficult. Attempts to make the task more difficult included adding an extra policeman doll for a total of three and adding more walls. However, this had no significant effect on the children's ability to hide the boy doll.

Policeman doll study conclusion

Hughes concluded that the results he gathered demonstrated that children over the age of four years old do not demonstrate nearly as much egocentric thought as was previously assumed and found by studies such as the three mountains task. The children in this task were clearly able to take multiple viewpoints into account, which was not established by Piaget.

The results of this task tell us that Piaget's test may have been reductive and didn't take into account factors such as children's ability to understand the task When testing egocentric thinking. Hughes' argument that the three mountains task was simply too complicated for young children is supported by the results of his study.

Hughes policeman doll study Strength & weakness

Hughes' study is a valuable response to Piaget's work, but no study is perfect. Let's analyse its strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths

• Hughes used an experimental design, which allowed him to have high levels of control over the experiment and its Variables. This means that his results are reliable and could easily be reproduced by anyone following the same method.

• Hughes' experiment was far more reminiscent of a situation a child might find themselves in in real life. While it's unusual for a child to be confronted by the police, they often enjoy games such as hide and seek, which also require them to understand the viewpoints of others. This may mean the results may be more applicable and valid than those from Piaget's experiment.

• Overall the task was simpler and made more intuitive sense to the children than Piaget's to show that children may not be as egocentric as what was previously proposed.

Weaknesses

• The children used in this study were all British boys, so we may not be able to extrapolate the results to the entire population. This negatively impacts the validity of the results.

• The study used a very small sample size of just 30, making it harder to extrapolate its findings and generalise them to the broader population.

• While this experiment was more natural and intuitive to the children than Piaget's three mountains experiment, it still took place in an artificial environment and may therefore lack ecological validity.