Question: What age does a human develop awareness of danger, like if a baby was crawling on a cliff, how old would it be to know that it should stop crawling when it got to the edge?

Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 17 Mar 2014:

Have you heard of the book “50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)”? http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dangerous-Things-Should-Your-Children/dp/0451234197

Danger awareness doesn’t suddenly start, but develops gradually. This means if you are not exposed to dangers a little bit, your danger awareness can be slower to set in. There is a lot of concern that parents are too protective of their children and you’ll all grow up unable to look after yourselves – for example, scout leaders worry about this and see their role as “curing” kids of lack of exposure to danger! Basically this learning is a function of experience. If you put something in your mouth and it pricks you, you get gradually more cautious about putting things in your mouth and look to see what the prickly things look like and learn how to spot danger. If you slip down a step and hurt yourself, you’ll be a lot warier of cliffs than if you were unfamiliar with the idea of falling.

After a certain age, it gets hard to find people who haven’t developed these skills, but you can still be surprised. It may depend on character: boldness lets you make more mistakes and learnt earlier, whereas cautiousness means you might identify dangers easily, or even over-identify dangers.

Understanding things also helps. As a climber, I see novice climbers very wary of heights, but confident climbing close to the ground, but in experienced climbers the reverse. This is because the experienced climbers know if they fall from high up the rope will catch them before they hit the ground, but this might not be true if they fall from lower. They don’t have to have hit the ground to learn this because they know its dangerous generally so carefully look at how the equipment works.