If you watch the whole length of this video, you will see that every time that the boy says that one of them is different, the woman asks him why it's different. As the boy tries to justify his answer he comes up with these excuses that to him might make sense, but to someone older makes absolutely no sense. With the test with the pennies, the boy first says they're the same, then when she spreads them out he says the top one has more because it is more spread out. Then, the woman asks the boy to count the coins and he counts them being the same and then he realizes that they are the same. From here, you can see that the boy isn't using logic at all to solve these problems, he is doing it merely because of the physical appearance.
With the water, the boys didn't just see the that it was the same when the cups of water were presented to him. This is what I found most interesting. When the woman poured the cups, she told the boy to tell her when they were the same, he got to choose the amount of how much was in the cup. The boy knew that it was the same, not just because he looked at it and saw that it was the same. The boy knew it was the same because he got to decide it was the same. The woman then switched the cup to a taller glass, the boy said that one had more in it. This is what made me so confused with the boy and the experiment. The boy had previously made it that it was the same. He set it to be the same! That's what gets me the most confused about this. What are your thoughts on the fact that the boy set it to be even? Do you think it's just the same as when the boy just saw it after it was already poured and said that it was the same?
This is an interesting question. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the boy is in the pre-operational stage, because he hasn't developed conservation yet. When he watched someone pour the water, he first saw them as having the same amount and then one having more. Even though he told her when they were the same, he still didn't realize that the water stays the same amount when being poured into a third glass. He thinks more water just magically appears or because, as he put it, "that one is higher". It's like overgeneralizing grammar rules- he learns that when something is higher than the other, it means that there's more, so he generalizes that rules to this situation: since the level of liquid in one glass is higher than the other, that one has more.
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