Chances are that you have recently heard media reports about the increase in angry minifigures. Some of those media reports even go into the area of these changes being bad for children. Won’t somebody please think of the children!
“Lego creating more angry faces and it could harm children’s development – researcher”
– News.com.au
“Legos Study Reveals Angry Faces On Toys Could Influence Your Child’s Negative Behavior”
– Medical Daily
Unfortunately for the alarmist media, the original study has nothing to do with the impact of these figures on the development of children. I don’t think those media outlets actually took the time to read the report.
All of the alarmist articles seem to be focusing on one particular quote from the report’s author Christoph Bartneck
We cannot help but wonder how the move from only positive faces to an increasing number of negative faces impacts on how children play.
Christoph Bartneck was asking a question, not answering it.
Bricking Around took the time to read the report, and looked at some of the elements that were missed by the media.
We investigate and present a summary of the development of the facial expression for all LEGO Minifigures that were released between 1975 and 2010
We can’t help but wonder if the results would be different if the report included figures from 2010-2013 as the collectible minifigure series was introduced in 2010. This means that there are 161 different minifigures not included in the study, all with a unique facial expression. The study also does not include any friends minidolls.
264 adult participants, located in the US, filled in the questionnaire
Before the developmental impact of angry minfigures is looked at, there would need to be further research done into how children themselves see the figures.
On average, each face was rated on 3.9 different emotion scales with a standard deviation of 1.39. This indicates that many faces are to some degree ambiguous.
I suspect that ambiguous facial expressions will more easily allow children to fit the figures into their own narrative. MOC builders will know that certain heads will seem completely different depending on the MOC itself. An angry minifigure can easily become a confident warrior when a sword is place in his hand.
Emotion Count Happiness 324 Anger 192 Sadness 49 Disgust 28 Surprise 23 Fear 11
This is the actual rating data. The media reports make out that most minifigures are angry. The raw data indicates that of the figures reviewed, most are happy. What the report did find, was a trend…
Happiness and anger seem to be the most frequent emotional expression of the Minifigure faces and their intensity is widely scattered. This scatter makes it very difficult to create a model that would adequately represent the development of faces over time. Still, we can observe a trend over time that the proportion of happy faces decrease and the proportion of angry faces increase.
What the conclusion of the report doesn’t make clear is that the proportion of angry minifigures is based on the new figures produced each year.
If in a year 20 new faces were released and 10 of them were rated predominantly as happy then the graph would indicate a value of 50%
New licensed themes will require production of new minifigures that match the actual character, and licensed themes are the most likely to contain angry minifigures. It should be obvious to even the casual observer that new happy yellow minifigure prints are not as common (except in CMF). Take the 2013 set 60026: Town Square. It contains 8 ‘happy’ minifigure faces but none of those are new prints for 2013. Happy figures are more easily reused across themes and years.
Christoph Bartnek has also responded to the media reports on his personal blog: http://www.bartneck.de/2013/06/13/reflection-minifigure-study/
The full report quoted above can be read here (pdf link) http://bartneck.de/publications/2013/agentsWithFaces/bartneckLEGOAgent.pdf
Thanks for looking past the headlines. The thing I find astonishing about all this is that the media seems to treat LEGO like you’re automatically exposed to every product LEGO offers – if LEGO makes an angry face and you don’t like it, just don’t buy it!
Very good point. One reason why I am glad that they added more minifigures to the Creator line. I think those are perfect for those people who want non-conflict sets.