Batman comes to the rescue of parents who don’t know how to get their kids to finish their homework.
According to the , children ages four to six who pretend to be Batman while doing important but boring tasks are more resistant to distractions and stay more focused than children who try to complete them without the Dark Knight’s help.
In this research, 180 children who were between four and six years old were recruited and a series of tests were applied to them. tests psychological tests to evaluate your memory capacity, empathy and mental control.
The children were then assigned to a series of boring, slow and supposedly “important” tasks for a period of 10 minutes, which consisted of pressing the space bar on a computer keyboard every time an image of a cheese came on the screen. Children were also told that they did not have to do anything when they saw a picture of a cat. Everyone was encouraged to stay on task, but they were told they could take a break and play on a nearby iPad whenever they needed it.
They were then divided into groups: one group was asked to reflect on their performance through the question “am I working hard?”, another group was asked to reflect on their performance from the third-person perspective, by example: Is “Luisito” (child’s name) working hard? The last group was given a cape or some simple material to dress up with — a cape, for example — and they were asked to imagine that they were Batman, Bob the Builder, Rapunzel, or Dora the Explorer, and to ask themselves: “Is Batman or is he working?” hard?
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As expected, the six-year-olds stayed on the task longer than the four-year-olds. Nothing surprising there. The interesting thing was that the children in the group who pretended to be Batman or any of the characters they chose were the ones who spent the most time doing boring tasks and those who were the least distracted by using the iPad.
One possible explanation is that fictional characters help children take a step back from the task, which helps them resist immediate distractions and prioritize long-term goals. Another possible explanation—related to the previous one—is that perhaps the characters could have made the task more fun for the children or that the children could have identified with some of their qualities: duty, honor, responsibility, etc.
The Batman effect, if you want to call it that, offers us a creative way to involve children in activities that help them develop perseverance, emotional self-regulation and concentration.
Fountain: