Mills And Keil's The Development Of Cynicism

Cynicism is the sense of distrust that one has towards the motives of another person. It is a state of believing that the other person is talking with self-interest. So how does one develop this sense of distrust? In the article titled “The Development of Cynicism” written by Mills and Keil, the development of cynicism in children were studied and evaluated. A total of 60 children participated in the study; 20 kindergarteners; 20 second graders, and 20 fourth graders. The study was equally balanced in gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. In addition, the experiment took place in a quiet room for about 20 minutes each. In experiment 1, the children were told a series of stories that had unclear conclusions with four different methods of storytelling. The story telling methods were divided into ones with self-interest, against self-interest, truth, and lie. The level of the child’s believability to each method of storytelling was calculated and reported through a visual representation of a bar graph. …show more content…
It has several strengths and a few weaknesses. The visual representation was a strength because it allowed the viewer clearly see the differences in results, increasing the impact of the report. The method of their experiment was simple and covered all the problems that they were questioning. Their experiment procedures were constant for each participant which stabilizes the results of the experiment. On the other hand, the number and variety of participants could have been increased and more diverse. Although they had a total of 60 participants, it was only 20 children from only 3 grade levels that were overall fairly close in age. Gathering a greater number of participants from several grade levels would have made the experiment even stronger. Altogether, this experiment and article is highly credible and offers great insight into how cynicism develops in