# Are you wiser than a 5th grader?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175
**Category:** The Game Room
**Created:** [May 20, 2010, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175 "2010-05-20T20:09:46Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@shijinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shijinn)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2010, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/1 "2010-05-20T20:09:46Z")
> [@Why is ignorance of age not an excuse?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-ignorance-of-age-not-an-excuse/538677/479):
>
> There is absolutely no way that even the most precocious eleven year old could pass as a sixteen year old, still less eighteen, in any serious conversation. They just don’t understand things in the same way as adults.
>
> Simple but famous example - get them to consider a starving man stealing bread to feed his family. They’ll all claim it is wrong (except for the sociopathic bastards that so many of the child “geniuses” turn out to be, who won’t even understand that concept)… they just don’t get shades of grey.
not sure where to put this, so for the moment let’s just make it a game of listing questions like the above. questions that would distinguish the grownups and the 10-year-olds. they should be easily understood questions anyone could answer. please also provide the litmus that would mark them as grownup or child. spoilers are optional. discussions on how valid a test is also optional but welcomed. atm, i have no opinions on the quote above until i go try it out.
mine,
Q: “Is that your boy/girl friend?”
if the answer is “YEEEEE!!11!!1!”, accompanied by a look of disgust and an attempt to clobber you, then they are kids. [/spoiler] Q: “I found a cassette tape!” if the answer is “huh?”, they’re kids. Q: point to a barcode, “What’s that?” [spoiler] if the answer is “a hologram”, then they’re dinosaurs.
on preview: perhaps we should limit it to one test per post to better conform to what a thread game should look like.
* * *
Angry Lurker Vanity Target V0.1a
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### Author:  [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2010, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/2 "2010-05-20T20:27:30Z")
I’ll ask my 10 year old niece the starving man stealing bread question this weekend when I go over to see them and see what she says.
I’ll try out any other good ones as well. The ones spoilered in the OP, not so much.
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### Author:  [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2010, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/3 "2010-05-20T20:27:38Z")
Off topic but what thread is the Angry Lurker quote from?
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### Author:  [@shijinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shijinn)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2010, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/4 "2010-05-20T20:37:27Z")
yeah they were just responses i remembered from the past. i too hope to get better ones to ask!
the quote is from [here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12477572#post12477572). on IE, there is a small arrow next to the quoted person’s name which will bring you to the post in question.
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### Author:  [@MeanOldLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MeanOldLady)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2010, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/5 "2010-05-20T20:45:31Z")
Not exactly wisdom-related, but this reminds me of a story that I’ll share now.
When I was five, my sister asked everyone in the family what a book was. Our ages at the time were 5, 6, 9, 15, 18, 44 and 67. I was the 5 year old. I believe my answer was something silly like “You know, that thing with the pages.” When she was done, she read all of our answers back to us. I thought mine sounded fine at the time, but with each new answer, but by the time she’d gotten to the 9 year old’s my answer felt silly, and when she got to my mother’s response, my thought was, “Oh yeah! Why didn’t I say it like that?” Um, because I was 5. 🙂
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### Author:  [@Dead\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Cat)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/6 "2010-05-21T11:52:21Z")
I’m sure there are all sorts of questions that could work in individual cases, but would produce false positives and false negatives in other cases. For example, before I learned to drive, for some reason I never realised that (when driving a car with a manual gearbox) that you had to let the clutch out smoothly when moving off, otherwise you’d stall, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in this. A question along those lines could therefore serve as a test of whether someone is above or below the legal driving age, but of course with some people you will get false positives (children who have driven on a farm, or just watched someone else’s feet while they were driving), and false negatives (adults who don’t drive, or who only learnt to drive an automatic).
I think that all the examples in the OP could fail similarly, but I really like the “stealing” one, and it is possibly the best so far. Even that would be hardly reliable, though, IMO - it is usually a mistake to underestimate how deeply children can think.
> [@MeanOldLady](#):
>
> Not exactly wisdom-related, but this reminds me of a story that I’ll share now.
>
> When I was five, my sister asked everyone in the family what a book was. Our ages at the time were 5, 6, 9, 15, 18, 44 and 67. I was the 5 year old. I believe my answer was something silly like “You know, that thing with the pages.” When she was done, she read all of our answers back to us. I thought mine sounded fine at the time, but with each new answer, but by the time she’d gotten to the 9 year old’s my answer felt silly, and when she got to my mother’s response, my thought was, “Oh yeah! Why didn’t I say it like that?” Um, because I was 5. 🙂
Heh, I’m 24 years old, and even after thinking about it a short time, I’m struggling to come up with a (much) better definition of a book than “that thing with pages”! 🙂 Your mum must have been smart.
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### Author:  [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 12:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/7 "2010-05-21T12:02:12Z")
> [@Freudian\_Slit](#):
>
> Off topic but what thread is the Angry Lurker quote from?
Click the little blue chevron beside the name in the quote box, and you will be taken to the thread. In this case, it’s “Why is ignorance of age not an excuse?” which is about statutory rape.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/8 "2010-05-21T20:12:01Z")
I don’t know, it seems to me that by the time I was in 5th grade, I already understood Jean Valjean to be a sympathetic character. I hadn’t read the whole thing, of course, but I understood that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one’s family wasn’t all that bad.
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### Author:  [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/9 "2010-05-21T21:51:27Z")
“Is lying bad? Why?”
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### Author:  [@tr0psn4j](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tr0psn4j)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/10 "2010-05-21T21:56:36Z")
> [@begbert2](#):
>
> “Is lying bad? Why?”
Because if I get caught, I’ll get in trouble.
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### Author:  [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)
#### Post date: [May 21, 2010, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/11 "2010-05-21T22:01:42Z")
> [@tr0psn4j](#):
>
> Because if I get caught, I’ll get in trouble.
Well, if you want to avoid _all_ the false positives, the only question that works is “How old are you?”
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2010, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/12 "2010-05-22T20:09:07Z")
For second-graders, it’s easier. There’s a famous experiment in which you pour liquid from a tall, thin glass into a short, fat glass, and ask a kid whether there’s more, less, or the same amount of liquid. Nearly all kids younger than about 6 will say that there was more liquid in the tall thin glass, even though they just saw you pour the liquid from one glass to the other. It’s a developmental thing. [edit: it works in reverse also, smartass.]
In my second-grade class, I had a similar experience recently. We were working on fractions, and kids had discovered three different blocks that were half the size of a particular rectangular prism. I lined these three blocks up side by side (one was a cube, one was a thinner rectangular prism, and one was a triangular prism) and asked, which one of these three is the biggest?
The kids argued excitedly about which one was the biggest. Not one of them realized the correct answer, an answer that should have been completely obvious given their understanding of the blocks’ fractional relationship to the original block. And some of these kids are real smart, too.
I wonder if there’s a similar sort of developmental question you could ask fifth graders, something to do with abstract thought, perhaps. [Consider the question, “What if people had no thumbs?”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw36PpYPPZM)
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### Author:  [@shijinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shijinn)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2010, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/13 "2010-05-24T17:13:27Z")
anecdote - tried the bread question:
“a hungry man steals bread to feed his family, what do you do?”
“nothing.”
“nothing? do you think it’s right or wrong?”
“wrong.”
“you mean if you’re a customer and you see someone doing that you will…”
“keep quiet.”
“what if you’re the sales assistant?”
“i’ll pay for the bread”
“what if you’re the police?”
“i’ll arrest him.”
“why?”
“it’s my job!”
“…”
“why are you asking me this?”
i think the kid will grow up to be a fine bard, or perhaps a paladin.
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### Author:  [@MeanOldLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MeanOldLady)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2010, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/14 "2010-05-24T18:10:52Z")
> [@Dead\_Cat](#):
>
> Heh, I’m 24 years old, and even after thinking about it a short time, I’m struggling to come up with a (much) better definition of a book than “that thing with pages”! 🙂 Your mum must have been smart.
More than anything, she’s just anal. Whereas most of us in a casual conversation would just give something that would help someone identify a book if they needed to, my mom sat and took the time to offer the most comprehensive definition she could think of. I didn’t realize I was part of a research experiment at the time, but even if I had, I doubt I could have given a definition as good as my mother’s.
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### Author:  [@Gukumatz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gukumatz)
#### Post date: [May 29, 2010, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/15 "2010-05-29T01:22:31Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#):
>
> I wonder if there’s a similar sort of developmental question you could ask fifth graders, something to do with abstract thought, perhaps. [Consider the question, “What if people had no thumbs?”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw36PpYPPZM)
My old natural sciences teacher used the “pipette test” as a litmus on every new class. (This was about 4th grade for me)
Basically, there’s three tall and thin glasses of water in a row on a hollow glass base. (So they’re all basically connected to each other) The leftmost is about the thickness of a thumb, the middle is about the thickness of a drinking straw and the rightmost is about the thickness of a needle. All the glasses are hollow and the walls are very thin.
The teacher then asked us; if he poured a glass of water into the device, what would the water level look like?
Most of the class agreed that the slimmest glass would hold the most water, since it was thinnest and could only hold so much, while the middling glass would also be pretty full, and the big glass would hold what’s left over. Most of the rest thought that it would be the other way around, because the biggest glass could obviously hold more.
Karl, who was a bit of a smart-ass, pointed out that water was self-regulating and would stay even in all three glasses. [That got a heated and disbelieving response - he managed to talk it up to a bet for $2,50 and a football card. Today he works as a petroleum engineer for Statoil, surprising exactly none of the rest of us.]
And, to conclude, the teacher told us that both sides were right; Karl was in essence entirely and fully right [at which point Karl basically smelled a “but” coming and demanded we fork over the money instantly] but for the “pipette effect”, which means that water can only compress so much in size and would in fact stand slightly taller in the thinnest glass.
That worked out as a pretty good litmus test for our class, at least. I think you could have pretty accurately judged people on how quick they were to jump over to Karl’s point of view once he pointed it out. [Me being about third to last probably explains why I have a Bachelor in Arts, not Science. :p)
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### Author:  [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)
#### Post date: [May 29, 2010, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/16 "2010-05-29T01:33:25Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#):
>
> kids had discovered three different blocks that were half the size of a particular rectangular prism. I lined these three blocks up side by side (one was a cube, one was a thinner rectangular prism, and one was a triangular prism) and asked, which one of these three is the biggest?
>
> The kids argued excitedly about which one was the biggest. Not one of them realized the correct answer, an answer that should have been completely obvious given their understanding of the blocks’ fractional relationship to the original block. And some of these kids are real smart, too.
You must be very careful with conclusions and the exact wording. In my experience “biggest” to kids that age generally means tallest (or oldest in connection with people) and not most volume.
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### Author:  [@Fuzzy\_Dunlop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuzzy_Dunlop)
#### Post date: [May 29, 2010, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/17 "2010-05-29T01:41:32Z")
> [@EllisDee](#):
>
> I’ll ask my 10 year old niece the starving man stealing bread question this weekend when I go over to see them and see what she says.
>
> I’ll try out any other good ones as well. The ones spoilered in the OP, not so much.
I didn`t read the quote in context, but the snippet posted at the beginning of this thread explained it incorrectly. As a measure of moral development the only thing that matters is the level of reasoning behind the answer. At each stage, including the terminal one, you can come out with either answer. It’s not like kids say no and adults say yes.
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [May 30, 2010, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/18 "2010-05-30T18:31:35Z")
> [@OldGuy](#):
>
> You must be very careful with conclusions and the exact wording. In my experience “biggest” to kids that age generally means tallest (or oldest in connection with people) and not most volume.
Except that when I turned blocks on their side, it really confused them: had they simply been interpreting it as “tallest,” turning the blocks on their side would have instantly changed the order of biggest to littlest without any confusion.
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### Author:  [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)
#### Post date: [May 30, 2010, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/19 "2010-05-30T21:22:53Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#):
>
> Except that when I turned blocks on their side, it really confused them: had they simply been interpreting it as “tallest,” turning the blocks on their side would have instantly changed the order of biggest to littlest without any confusion.
I dunno. If I and my skinnier yet taller cousin lay down, I don’t suddenly become the tallest.
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [May 31, 2010, 10:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-wiser-than-a-5th-grader/540175/20 "2010-05-31T10:38:52Z")
> [@BigT](#):
>
> I dunno. If I and my skinnier yet taller cousin lay down, I don’t suddenly become the tallest.
Of course you don’t–it’s very clear which side of you is the top (i.e, the crown of your head). With these plain wooden blocks, no side is labeled “this side up.”
What happened is that the kids were suddenly confused and had to re-evaluate their definition of “biggest.” Keep in mind also that the kids I showed the blocks to **argued** about which one was the biggest: they didn’t all have the same definition in mind to begin with.
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