Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from house Stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to Blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb Kianda. I'm Joe mcformer. You know, Joe,
Speaker 1: I have a three and a half year old in
Speaker 1: the house and uh and I and I grew up
Speaker 1: with two younger siblings, so I'm pretty familiar with whining.
Speaker 1: I imagine you're pretty familiar with whining as well. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't have kids, but I was once a kid
Speaker 1: myself and familiar with whining from a personal perspective, and
Speaker 1: also I had a younger sister, and so I heard
Speaker 1: some whining there, and of course whining from the other
Speaker 1: kids I knew. I actually just heard some whining recently,
Speaker 1: I think when it was Halloween and there were I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe you can judge whether this was whining
Speaker 1: or not, UH listeners at home on on Halloween night.
Speaker 1: It was a wonderful occasion when all the stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind people got together at my house. So
Speaker 1: Robert was there with his child, and Noel was there
Speaker 1: with his child, and Christian was there with his serial
Speaker 1: killer mask and UH, and at one point I remember
Speaker 1: I think there was some disagreement between parents and children
Speaker 1: about whether it was time to go or then you
Speaker 1: definitely heard whining. Was there whining? I'm not sure how
Speaker 1: to classify it. There's so much whining in my life
Speaker 1: at this point it's hard for me to remember specific
Speaker 1: incidents of whining unless it's unless the material being whined
Speaker 1: about is is really you know, sets itself apart. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm constantly saying, well, what's a nicer
Speaker 1: way to say that? Or I can't understand you when
Speaker 1: you talk in that whiny voice, which is one of
Speaker 1: those things that I specifically remember hearing my parents say
Speaker 1: to my younger sisters growing up. Now, of course they
Speaker 1: were lying to you because they could understand you. They
Speaker 1: just didn't want you to do it anymore. Right, It's
Speaker 1: like the way that you were phrasing that is so
Speaker 1: irritating and just so grating on my sanity that I
Speaker 1: cannot acknowledge it. I refuse to listen to you while
Speaker 1: you were talking in that whiny voice. So today we're
Speaker 1: obviously going to be talking about the science of whining,
Speaker 1: and whining actually does turn out to be a kind
Speaker 1: of interesting feature of human communication. What is whining and
Speaker 1: how is whining different from from talking, from crying from
Speaker 1: all the other ways we communicate. Well, it's often described
Speaker 1: as a combination of several different things, So there's an
Speaker 1: element of pleading to it, demanding, pestering, and nagging that
Speaker 1: escalates in pitch. It begins during infancy and peaks. Luckily,
Speaker 1: it's good to know for me that there is a
Speaker 1: peak to it between two point five and four years
Speaker 1: of age. You know, it's funny because they say they
Speaker 1: say it peaks, but I've read in some of the
Speaker 1: studies that we're referencing in this episode that whining never
Speaker 1: really stops, like you carry it into adulthood. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think it's just that most adults learned to curb it
Speaker 1: and know that it sounds that they're ultimately humiliating themselves
Speaker 1: and they're whining about something. And uh, for the most part,
Speaker 1: it is a child whining at a caregiver, but ultimately
Speaker 1: anyone is fair game. Well, usually I think whining goes
Speaker 1: up right, you don't wind down. Parent doesn't whine at
Speaker 1: the child, The boss doesn't whine at the employee. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe they would, but most of the time the whining
Speaker 1: goes up. The superiority change. Yeah, so I've definitely heard
Speaker 1: kids whining at other kids. I didn't want you to
Speaker 1: take that, that sort of thing, I wanted to play
Speaker 1: with that, etcetera. It comes from a from a perceived
Speaker 1: position of disadvantage. You know, I say, like I've been
Speaker 1: I've been taking advantage of I've got to wine at
Speaker 1: the person who who, at least for now, is the
Speaker 1: upper hand. Like a whining at another child is generally
Speaker 1: immediately followed by whining at the nearest caregiver to point
Speaker 1: out the slight that just took place. Yeah, yeah, she
Speaker 1: took a sip out of my coke. I don't want that.
Speaker 1: I don't like it. She has to give me hers now.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean it's everything like I wanted to
Speaker 1: be the one to get the fork out of the drawer,
Speaker 1: or I wanted to be the one to do this.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be the one to do that. It
Speaker 1: just goes on forever. Yeah, I can't find my shoes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh So I was interested in how whining compares to
Speaker 1: other methods of communication, and I actually found a study
Speaker 1: from eleven that looked into this. It's sort of tried
Speaker 1: to categorize different modes of attachment communication. That's something that
Speaker 1: that often gets brought up a term, this attachment communication,
Speaker 1: because it's not so much something that's likely to occur
Speaker 1: between strangers. It's sort of a communication between child and caregiver,
Speaker 1: or it plays on an existing relationship. But the paper
Speaker 1: was called Screaming, yelling, whining and crying, Categorical and Intensity
Speaker 1: Differences in vocal expressions of anger and sadness and Children's tantrums. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so it was a two thousand eleven study that
Speaker 1: tried to categorize the different types of noises young children
Speaker 1: make while throwing tantrums. And they use high fidelity audio
Speaker 1: sampling of natural emotional episode. So instead of having people
Speaker 1: try to whine and then listening to what that's like,
Speaker 1: they tried to say, okay, catch some kids whining in
Speaker 1: the wild, and what does it sound like? And it
Speaker 1: groups together under a couple of categories that they have
Speaker 1: an anger category which includes screaming and yelling, and then
Speaker 1: they have a sadness category that includes fussing, whining and crying,
Speaker 1: and fussing, whining and crying ultimately end up being categorized
Speaker 1: as three stages of escalating intensity and sadness. So you've
Speaker 1: got a sadness episode that's mounting, and it starts with fussing,
Speaker 1: which they describe as typically short, flat or falling melody,
Speaker 1: relatively quiet and low pitched, so no, no, no. Then
Speaker 1: you move up to whining, which they say typically contain
Speaker 1: some verbal content with an up and down melody. May
Speaker 1: also include relatively shrill, monotonous non verbal vocalization son, And
Speaker 1: then of course you go to the old classic. Crying
Speaker 1: is relatively loud and effort full, typically with up and
Speaker 1: down melody. Breath may be interrupted, as in sobbing, similar
Speaker 1: to an infant's cry. So they put whining here in
Speaker 1: the middle of this spectrum of escalating sadness. I don't
Speaker 1: know what you'd think about that as apparent yourself. I mean,
Speaker 1: does that ring true to you? Um? Yeah, certainly. I
Speaker 1: can see crying position making sense, but whining and fussing
Speaker 1: is some Sometimes I feel like that's kind of a
Speaker 1: toss up because it kind of comes down to can
Speaker 1: I talk you down from a wine or down from
Speaker 1: a fuss more easily like? Which? Which? Which is the shorter,
Speaker 1: shorter route connecting it to normal modes of communication and
Speaker 1: behavior and God, I feel like maybe whiny is easier
Speaker 1: for me to to to deal with and fussy. Huh.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but it's it's kind of a toss up.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to think about it during my interactions. Uh.
Speaker 1: From here hunt out take a scientific approach to your
Speaker 1: child's low intensity distress. Yeah, and I even I have
Speaker 1: to ask him as that it now is this a
Speaker 1: fuss or whine? I need to know for the research.
Speaker 1: Oh and another thing I just wanted to say was
Speaker 1: that numerically in that study I just looked at across
Speaker 1: the course of it, they recorded a thirteen different children
Speaker 1: featuring multiple tantrum so there are a bunch of different
Speaker 1: vocalization incidents recorded. They found that whining was by far
Speaker 1: the most common of these five vocalizations yelling, screaming, fussing, whining,
Speaker 1: and crying. There was way more whining than anything else.
Speaker 1: That sounds about right. But surely somebody has tried to
Speaker 1: come up with a sort of scientific theoretical explanation to
Speaker 1: explain the nature of whining, where it comes from evolutionarily speaking,
Speaker 1: and and how it fits into the broad or spectrum
Speaker 1: of human communication and and caregiver to h caregiven communication
Speaker 1: caregiv child. Yeah. Indeed, and there have been at least
Speaker 1: a couple of good studies that we're going to discuss here. Um.
Speaker 1: The first of which concerns mother ease. More mother ease
Speaker 1: as in like Chinese like a language. Now well yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: essentially h. The more technical term is child directed speech
Speaker 1: or cd S. Mother ease is the annoying way that
Speaker 1: you might hear not only a mother, but a father,
Speaker 1: any kind of caregiver speaking to a child in their charge.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of a colloquial name like baby talk, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's kind of like baby talk. Um the and
Speaker 1: and it's it's similar in many ways, uh to whining.
Speaker 1: The two modes of speech seemed to have a lot
Speaker 1: in common, though, Mother Rea's plays a definite role in attachment.
Speaker 1: So Motheria's an example would be like, hey, honey, I
Speaker 1: really need you to see about getting your socks on. Hey, honey,
Speaker 1: we don't actually wear socks like that in this house.
Speaker 1: So those would be two examples of mother EA's um.
Speaker 1: And and hopefully when you encounter it, you're not encountering
Speaker 1: an adult speaking to you in this way, because then
Speaker 1: that that can be even extra annoying. Okay, So I'm
Speaker 1: trying to note the sort of acoustic or sonic characteristics
Speaker 1: of what you just did. For for the child directed speech,
Speaker 1: one of the things was that it was slower than
Speaker 1: you normally talk. Yes, you put a little more space
Speaker 1: in there, and it sounded a little bit higher, like
Speaker 1: you're elevating your pitch. Yeah. What's the other thing, It
Speaker 1: almost has kind of a melody to it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a melodic aspect to it, and in
Speaker 1: early development that it's believe that the melodic maternal speech
Speaker 1: functions uh uh more to to elicit and maintain attention
Speaker 1: by accommodating the the infants very limited auditory and cognitive capabilities.
Speaker 1: So in a sense that just the melody is being
Speaker 1: used as a way to modulate the infants effective state
Speaker 1: without having depended as much on the actual language, like
Speaker 1: really the languages as much there for the the the
Speaker 1: parent that it's speaking as anything. Okay, So those things
Speaker 1: we just mentioned in the in the scientific terms would
Speaker 1: be what they call slowed production, So slower talking, increased pitch,
Speaker 1: and then um they say quote often flows into smooth,
Speaker 1: exaggerated pitch contours. That's the melodic nature of it, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's also you think of nursery rhymes too.
Speaker 1: In this case, nursery rhymes are even more melodic and
Speaker 1: ultimately musical. But uh, but it doesn't in the nursery rhyme,
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily matter for the young child what is
Speaker 1: being said, which is why one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: so many in nursery rhymes have horrific imagery in them
Speaker 1: about animals pecking out each other's eyes. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: the the idea here is that mother reason also serves
Speaker 1: as a scaffolding for the early stag stages of lane
Speaker 1: enguage acquisition. The actual words are irrelevant, but the melodic
Speaker 1: tone is key. Okay, So they sort of use like
Speaker 1: a parent would use this child directed speech pattern to
Speaker 1: to manage or maintain the child's emotional or affective state. Yes, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's about getting their attention and you know, thinking about
Speaker 1: like in my home, we try as much as possible
Speaker 1: to speak to our son more or less like he's
Speaker 1: an adult. You know, not really do a bunch of
Speaker 1: this mother ease, but you find yourself doing it, especially
Speaker 1: if you need to captivate their attention, you just fall
Speaker 1: back on it. But that's interesting. Then do you feel
Speaker 1: like when you're when you're inexorably drawn towards using mother
Speaker 1: ease or child directed speech, does that feel like a
Speaker 1: cultural thing? Do you? Or do you? Do you feel
Speaker 1: like that's in your bones, that's in your d n
Speaker 1: A is at a function of your revolution? I mean
Speaker 1: maybe both, because I because as I'm saying it, I'll realize, hey, this,
Speaker 1: I remember my my my mom or my dad having
Speaker 1: to talk like this with if not, if not with me,
Speaker 1: then at least with my younger sisters. If I'm having
Speaker 1: to say, hey, bash and I really need you to
Speaker 1: get your clothes on right now and go, I really
Speaker 1: don't like having to talk to you like this in
Speaker 1: this crazy weird singsong voice. Uh. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know it feel it feels as much part
Speaker 1: of background as anything. But maybe it has evolutionary keys
Speaker 1: as well. But you know, one of the things about
Speaker 1: the child directed speech that I saw come up in
Speaker 1: the literature was how you would use different types of
Speaker 1: of melodies or sort of u uh tone contours or
Speaker 1: pitch contours to signal different attitudes towards the child. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So on one hand, there's consistently rising contours that are
Speaker 1: all about just electing attention, and that would be like like, hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: it's time for us to see about getting our shoes
Speaker 1: on so we can leave for today. And then there's
Speaker 1: parents up prohibiting something. And then you see faster rising
Speaker 1: on tours, which would be again like now, bastition, we
Speaker 1: really don't wear socks like that in this house. So
Speaker 1: as you see, it's still that very much that signature
Speaker 1: Mothery's style, but faster rising contours. Oh Man, as an outsider,
Speaker 1: I give that a doctor spock. Fascinating. But so we
Speaker 1: got to bring it back to whining. What is the
Speaker 1: link between child directed speech and whining? Well, there's a
Speaker 1: two thousand five paper titled Whining as Mother directed Speech, uh,
Speaker 1: and this it explored this connection of the potential connection
Speaker 1: and this was published in Infinitial Development and it's the
Speaker 1: work of Rosemarrie I. Socle, Karen L. Webster, Nicholas S. Thompson,
Speaker 1: and David A. Stevens. So what they did is they
Speaker 1: took eighteen undergrad students, seven males and eleven females. They
Speaker 1: were these were all non parents, because previous studies had
Speaker 1: had demonstrated that there was an equal effectiveness of whining
Speaker 1: on non parents, and we'll actually don't have to have
Speaker 1: just still get your brain, it'll still get you. There's no,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. So they exposed these individuals to stimuli
Speaker 1: of six renditions of the sentence I want to go
Speaker 1: to Boston, each spoken by both the male and female,
Speaker 1: and the addition, these were the modes of each rendition.
Speaker 1: There was wine, you want to go to Boston, all right,
Speaker 1: I think that was good, and then there's just the
Speaker 1: neutral I want to go to Boston, which I'll supply
Speaker 1: I want to go to Boston. Oh, there you go,
Speaker 1: you got it, you got it for me? Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, No, no, no realized, No, no, no, I'll
Speaker 1: do the next one boasting, I want to go to
Speaker 1: Boston someday I will, all right, now demanding, give me
Speaker 1: a demanding I want to go to Boston. I want
Speaker 1: to go to Boston, all right, And then the next
Speaker 1: one question there would be uh, I want to go
Speaker 1: to Boston, and then finally I want to go to Boston. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. That was a little whiny. Give me
Speaker 1: more anger, I want to go to Boston. A little
Speaker 1: very good at it, I guess, let me give it
Speaker 1: a try. I want to go to Austin. Still a
Speaker 1: little whiny on my part though, I don't know. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll have to work that out in the actors studio
Speaker 1: later on. But but so what they did is that
Speaker 1: they yeah, they unleashed the different rendition. Now they are.
Speaker 1: One of the funny things was they didn't actually have
Speaker 1: kids doing it, right, it was young adult whiners. And
Speaker 1: they said, quote, experience tells us that whining speech like
Speaker 1: attachment relations does not disappear with the onset of adolescence
Speaker 1: in adulthood, but continues to be used with intimates at
Speaker 1: any age. Yichh. So yeah, so they said that it's
Speaker 1: employed in any attachment partner or two superior figures in
Speaker 1: a power relation. That's taying into the superiority thing we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier. Winding goes up the chain. But anyway,
Speaker 1: they said adults were used because they could supply the
Speaker 1: proper stimulus scripts better than children. So in each one
Speaker 1: of these they also featured a stimulus sentence. So what
Speaker 1: what is being said? What is happening that would it
Speaker 1: elect this response? With its appropriate emotional flavoring UM and
Speaker 1: then uh, the volunteers were asked to judge the similarity
Speaker 1: of twenty two pairings UM again of the various the
Speaker 1: various stimuli related to going to Boston, and sixty six
Speaker 1: punt combinations of the twelve statements. So this at Following this,
Speaker 1: there is a descriptive rating procedure in which the volunteers
Speaker 1: had to rate the twelve statements in terms of various
Speaker 1: qualities such as urgency, anger, loudness, etcetera. And then they
Speaker 1: also took acoustic measurements of everything as well. And they
Speaker 1: then they piled all this together into a three D
Speaker 1: model of the resulting data UM. And this is what
Speaker 1: they found that whining speech shared with Mothery's exaggerated pitch contours,
Speaker 1: specifically of a rising pattern, increased pitch, and slowed production
Speaker 1: in relation to adult directed or neutral speech. Okay, so
Speaker 1: that sounds like it. It matches the main things we
Speaker 1: observed earlier when talking about child directed speech. Yeah and interesting.
Speaker 1: So in a way, Huh, I don't hear it in
Speaker 1: my head, though I can see how it would be true,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't equate when an adult talks to
Speaker 1: a child in child directed speech. That doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: whining to me, but I can see how it shares uh,
Speaker 1: how it shares physical similarities. Yeah, well, because the parent
Speaker 1: typically has order and reason on their side and the
Speaker 1: child almost exclusively does not. The child, the parent is saying,
Speaker 1: I need you to get dressed so we can go
Speaker 1: to this thing that we go to every day at
Speaker 1: the same time, and you inevitably have to go to
Speaker 1: and the child is claiming, no, I want to eat
Speaker 1: ice cream first before breakfast. The child is making the
Speaker 1: particular statements, Yeah, it's fussing. Was whining about something that's
Speaker 1: completely pointless and it has no reason or order on
Speaker 1: the side of their argument. Now, one of the things
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier was why it's it's hypoth decized
Speaker 1: why mother mother ease or child directed speech sounds this way,
Speaker 1: And originally one idea was to accommodate the infants underdeveloped
Speaker 1: auditory system. But they talk about how whining is directed
Speaker 1: at adults with fully functioning hearing. You know, adults wine
Speaker 1: at each other sometimes. So the authors speculate that if
Speaker 1: we toss out this older hypothesis and just say that
Speaker 1: both whining and mother's exploit inherent sensitivities in the human
Speaker 1: nervous system. That might make sense. Yeah, that makes sense
Speaker 1: to me. I mean it's it's about what what mode
Speaker 1: of communication is going to elect the most response. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna in A whining child cannot be ignored.
Speaker 1: Um or whining child can be ignored, but at great difficulty. Yes,
Speaker 1: it certainly cannot be ignored. I mean I have had
Speaker 1: the experience being out in public and hearing somebody else's
Speaker 1: child wine, and it's just uh, I mean, it's utterly
Speaker 1: attention stealing. You can't think about an anything else while
Speaker 1: it's happening, you know. And here's something interesting. It's easy again,
Speaker 1: the parent is coming from a side of reason and order,
Speaker 1: and the child is generally speaking on behalf of chaos
Speaker 1: and uh and and just unreasonable nonsense. And yet, according
Speaker 1: to a two thousand twelve Max Plaque Institute for Evolutionary
Speaker 1: Anthropology study published in the American Psychological Association, children as
Speaker 1: young as three can distinguish between pure whining and a
Speaker 1: legitimate need for assistance and or sympathy. So they can
Speaker 1: they can deduce whether somebody's whining is justified. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: one kid is whining, the kids standing next to them
Speaker 1: can probably tell that it's b S. How did how
Speaker 1: did they test this? Okay? They took forty eight children,
Speaker 1: They split them easily between girls and boys from thirty
Speaker 1: six to thirty nine months old, and then they recorded
Speaker 1: reactions of each child as he or she witnessed an
Speaker 1: adult acting upset in one of three contexts. When the
Speaker 1: distress was justified, let's due to physical harm, material loss,
Speaker 1: or unfairness, when it was unjustified, and when the cause
Speaker 1: of the distress was unknown. Okay, So they had something
Speaker 1: like um, an adult getting an unfair distribution of toys
Speaker 1: like marbles exactly, Yeah, or I liked this one. An
Speaker 1: adult getting their drawing cut in half with scissors. They
Speaker 1: drew something and somebody cuts it up. Or an adult
Speaker 1: getting getting a toy chest lid knocked, getting knocked on
Speaker 1: the hands with it. So getting injured or losing a
Speaker 1: balloon was another one. Newly acquired healing balloon floats up
Speaker 1: and it's gone. Okay, So those are the justified ones,
Speaker 1: but there were also unjustified things where nothing really bad
Speaker 1: happened to the adult, but the children could tell the difference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could, They could level the the amount of character judgment,
Speaker 1: threat assessment, emotional assessment, and empathy necessary to say, Hey,
Speaker 1: you're getting upset over nothing, or yeah, that's awful, your
Speaker 1: balloon just totally floated away. That's a bummer man. So
Speaker 1: let's say you've got a child with two balloons and
Speaker 1: an adult with one balloon, and the adult loses the balloon.
Speaker 1: Does the child give one of the one of the
Speaker 1: one of his or her balloons to the adult? Well,
Speaker 1: that might depend on whether they saw the adult overreacting
Speaker 1: to nothing earlier, or whining in response to something legitimately
Speaker 1: unfair happening to him or her. Yeah, and then in
Speaker 1: the case of balloon related stress, the child would offer
Speaker 1: a balloon more quickly to the adult if the child
Speaker 1: had previously seen that adult upset due to true harm
Speaker 1: rather than a near inconvenience. That that's interesting that that
Speaker 1: a child has that level of judgment. But also this
Speaker 1: makes a distinction between legitimate whining and illegitimate whining. And
Speaker 1: I wonder about that because a funny thing I discovered
Speaker 1: when I was trying to find scientific research on whining
Speaker 1: is that a lot of the journal articles you can
Speaker 1: find about whining seemed to be coming from a business
Speaker 1: management or business philosophy perspective. If you came across I did.
Speaker 1: I certainly came across a lot of uses for the
Speaker 1: word whining that we're not related to to childhood development,
Speaker 1: as in meaning that whining is a non productive expression
Speaker 1: of distress, and that sort of fits with how I
Speaker 1: would use it colloquially. Colloquially like if I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about the way a child develops, but if I'm just
Speaker 1: talking about an adult whining, it's a it's a person
Speaker 1: who's just they're not getting anywhere that they don't have
Speaker 1: a legitimate complaint, they're just, you know, they're just being
Speaker 1: distressed for no good reason. Obviously, we all agree that
Speaker 1: that a person, an adult or child, can cry to
Speaker 1: signal a meaningful deprivation or violation, something bad has happened,
Speaker 1: that that actually matters, and they will cry about that.
Speaker 1: But can a wine signal the same or as a
Speaker 1: wine fundamentally inherently unjustified, and if they there's a good
Speaker 1: cause for it, do we call the wine something else? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I found myself thinking back on various outburst from my son,
Speaker 1: trying to decide Okay, I remember him whining about this,
Speaker 1: was that justified? And I'm really having a hard time
Speaker 1: thinking of a case where the wine was justified. The
Speaker 1: only possible example I can think of, and and not
Speaker 1: specific example, but there may have been times where there's
Speaker 1: been a slight to him by accidents, sort of like
Speaker 1: say I didn't give him a you know, a snack
Speaker 1: when I'm handing them out, just because I overlooked him
Speaker 1: and he catches onto that. He might have whined about it.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, things that are legitimately worth
Speaker 1: getting upset about, like the cat scratching him, are going
Speaker 1: to instantly go to like a fuss level or crying
Speaker 1: level of outburst. But if we go with the the
Speaker 1: the escalation from earlier, the wine is in the middle,
Speaker 1: So it's either lower as a fuss or higher as
Speaker 1: a cry or do you not go with the same escalation.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not sure I completely buy that that escalation graph.
Speaker 1: I feel like it might be a slightly different or
Speaker 1: more complex roadmap, because yeah, like if the cat scratches him,
Speaker 1: he's not gonna say the cat scratch me, He's gonna
Speaker 1: outburst about it, or like he's going to be more
Speaker 1: likely to whine and say something like like the cats
Speaker 1: sitting in my spot on the couch and I don't
Speaker 1: like that. So I don't know if that's helpful or not.
Speaker 1: But anyway, you gotta stand up to that cat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta look that cat right in the eye and
Speaker 1: say you have four legs, the couch doesn't belong to you. Well,
Speaker 1: good luck, because the cat has the clause. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: let's look at exactly how annoying whining is according to science. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think this is a good one to hit,
Speaker 1: uh last of all in this episode, because it really
Speaker 1: helps us to underlie the raw power of whining. So
Speaker 1: there's a two thousand and eleven study that came from
Speaker 1: the psychologists from Sonny and Clark University published in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology. And this is
Speaker 1: this involves at least one of the same researchers for
Speaker 1: that we've talked about earlier. Rosemarie so called it does,
Speaker 1: and I believe Nicol says Thompson as well. Um. The
Speaker 1: title of the article wines, cries, and motheries their relative
Speaker 1: power to distract. So the researchers set out to see
Speaker 1: if humans, including non parents, are hardwired to be more
Speaker 1: attuned to whining. So isw it all broke down? Volunteers
Speaker 1: were asked to try and complete a set of math
Speaker 1: problems while wearing headphones, and six different soundscapes were pumped
Speaker 1: into those headphones. You had toddler wines, you had baby cries,
Speaker 1: you had mother ease, you had two adults in a
Speaker 1: normal conversation. You had a screeching table saw. And then
Speaker 1: you had the deep sound of silence, and you had
Speaker 1: lew Reid's mental machine music. That would that would have
Speaker 1: been an interesting addition. So and also just to drive
Speaker 1: home to all, actual speech was in the was in
Speaker 1: a language unfamiliar to the volunteers, So that way they
Speaker 1: couldn't be semantically distracted, right, They had had to be
Speaker 1: based in the pitch and and just the sound. The
Speaker 1: acoustic qualities of the sample couldn't be that the words
Speaker 1: the selves were captivating, right, So this is These are
Speaker 1: the results. Volunteers completed the fewest problems and made the
Speaker 1: most mistakes while trying to block out the sign of
Speaker 1: a sound of a whiny infant. This was regardless regardless
Speaker 1: of gender or parental status. The err rate was nearly
Speaker 1: twice that of trying to work with a screeching table saw.
Speaker 1: And it's also worth knowing that mother eas and baby
Speaker 1: cries were also fairly distracting. The researchers positive that this
Speaker 1: demonstrates an evolutionary importance of whining to attract attention of
Speaker 1: a parent or caregiver. Well, that's interesting to compare because
Speaker 1: so obviously whining commands our attention. But as the last
Speaker 1: study showed, we can even children and probably much more
Speaker 1: so adults can easily recognize the I don't know what
Speaker 1: you call the the lack of importance or the lack
Speaker 1: of justification behind lots of whining, if not all whining. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I feel like this is where it's important to
Speaker 1: focus on something that psychologists in gear of evos pointed
Speaker 1: out and that there's likely a naturalistic fallacy at play here.
Speaker 1: So just because this is the idea that just because
Speaker 1: something is a natural product of our evolution, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that it's a good thing. Oh, this is this
Speaker 1: is a common reaction I see to Uh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: studies about human nature, human evolution, or speculations based in
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology is that they sort of point out humans
Speaker 1: tendency to do something that we don't like as natural,
Speaker 1: and then people react like, oh, so you're saying it's good.
Speaker 1: I mean natural doesn't mean good. Lots of natural things
Speaker 1: are bad. Yeah, So in this case, it was. This
Speaker 1: is basically my my take home on it. If you're
Speaker 1: looking at it based on the information we've discussed here,
Speaker 1: based on the caveat that it it may be a
Speaker 1: naturalistic fallacy, something that's that's a product of our evolution,
Speaker 1: but not necessarily helpful in and of itself. It sounds
Speaker 1: to me like crying, of course, is a necessary means
Speaker 1: by which an infant, young child, or even an adult
Speaker 1: alerts others to its dire need. And it whining and
Speaker 1: mother ease, to a certain extent, are essentially crying poured
Speaker 1: into the mold of language, becomes a mode of speaking
Speaker 1: and a way to bait our words with the un
Speaker 1: ignorable power of a crying infant left out in the cold.
Speaker 1: So anytime you hear a caregiver and a child speaking
Speaker 1: to each other, it's essentially two individuals crying at each
Speaker 1: other with words. Man. That's that's my my take home
Speaker 1: on all this. That's profound or disturbing. You know that
Speaker 1: this is a grown up in a child just crying
Speaker 1: at each other, but it's crying that's complicated by language. Well,
Speaker 1: I imagine that's a lot of what's happening a lot
Speaker 1: of the time in a in a household with children,
Speaker 1: because I mean, the presence of children just ups the
Speaker 1: stakes in every possible way, right, Like suddenly when you've
Speaker 1: got a kid with you, things that would normally be
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit frustrating can become dire. Suddenly this
Speaker 1: is so important. Yeah, and then everything's just harder getting
Speaker 1: out the door, harder to do. Yeah. I mean you
Speaker 1: saw when I was over there for Halloween, Bastim just
Speaker 1: getting back out of out of your house and leaving
Speaker 1: for the evening. Is is this this whole ordeal that
Speaker 1: has to be coordinated with with with with Noel and
Speaker 1: his daughter leaving, and we're both leaving at the same time,
Speaker 1: so that nobody's unfair. It's not unfair. Everybody's got a
Speaker 1: completely equal shake. In the end of Halloweing, you know,
Speaker 1: I was wondering about the question of why inherently we
Speaker 1: find whining and crying so unbearable, Like you'll do anything
Speaker 1: to make it stop. Uh, And you see this a
Speaker 1: lot of times, parents just caving into what seemed like
Speaker 1: ridiculous demands from their children just to make the whining stop.
Speaker 1: And I wonder. I mean, one obvious thing is that
Speaker 1: it's fear of social embarrassment. Right, Like you're out in
Speaker 1: public and your kids starts whining, and you know you're
Speaker 1: you're embarrassed. Everybody is looking at you. You feel like
Speaker 1: you're annoying everyone, and and that's a problem. But it
Speaker 1: seems like, uh, this would only make sense for whining
Speaker 1: and crying in public. Public situations might sort of increase
Speaker 1: the urgency of our need to stop the whining. But
Speaker 1: I imagine it still happens in private. You're in the
Speaker 1: privacy of your own home, and still the child is
Speaker 1: whining and you need to make it stop. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it didn't matter if anybody's listening. Just whine. You just
Speaker 1: the whining must stop. Please stop the whining. Tell me
Speaker 1: what you need to tell me in a normal voice,
Speaker 1: and we'll discuss it rationally. One hypothesis that I know
Speaker 1: I've read somewhere before. Before the episode, I was trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where I had read this, and I can't.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if it was in um one of Richard
Speaker 1: Dawkins biology books from years ago, you know, like if
Speaker 1: it was in The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker.
Speaker 1: But there there is an example of how sort of
Speaker 1: the generational evolutionary arms race between parents and offspring. And
Speaker 1: one of one of the examples to us there was
Speaker 1: about piercing bird chirps. What's happening when a chick in
Speaker 1: a bird's nest chirps with this piercing tone until it
Speaker 1: gets fed or gets the attention it needs, gets the
Speaker 1: help or whatever it wants from the parent. I know
Speaker 1: one possible way you could think about this is that
Speaker 1: the chick is threatening death. The chick is saying, I'm
Speaker 1: going to keep getting louder and higher pitched until I'm
Speaker 1: threatening to draw predators to the nest, and you must
Speaker 1: give me what I want or I'm going to kill
Speaker 1: us all. I I don't know if you can pourt
Speaker 1: that kind of intuition to thinking about human crying, but
Speaker 1: it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense. I mean,
Speaker 1: I couldn't begin to say that that's actually the explanation.
Speaker 1: It seems like there are a lot of factors involved there,
Speaker 1: But is that sort of the deep biological feeling of
Speaker 1: what's happening when when you're a parent and your child
Speaker 1: is whining, do you feel predators approaching? Do you feel
Speaker 1: doom looming in? Uh? Maybe a little bit. Maybe. I
Speaker 1: often think about Corman McCarthy's The Road and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the father and son hiding in the bushes, hoping that
Speaker 1: the villains don't discover them, the cannibals. And I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, if over there with my son, he might
Speaker 1: start whining about something, and then what am I gonna do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do I just got I have to give in completely
Speaker 1: to the whining, otherwise the cannibals will eat us. That's
Speaker 1: why you gotta carve those wood bullets. That's why you
Speaker 1: gotta do it and put up a good bluff. So
Speaker 1: we know this is a topic that almost all of
Speaker 1: you're gonna have some feedback on. If you're a parent,
Speaker 1: if you're you just had siblings, are you just around
Speaker 1: kids at any point in the course of your life, Uh,
Speaker 1: then you're gonna want to share your thoughts in this
Speaker 1: so hey, and you can always finds stuff about your
Speaker 1: mind dot com. That's where we'll find Our podcast episodes
Speaker 1: are video or blog coast and Hey, if you want
Speaker 1: to reach out to us via email, how can you
Speaker 1: do it, Joe? You can let us know your thoughts
Speaker 1: about the science of whining or your favorite personal whining
Speaker 1: and crying story. It blow the mind. It how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.