Tempering the tension between science and intuition

Scientific ideas can be difficult to access if they contradict earlier-developed intuitive theories; counterintuitive scientific statements like "bubbles have weight" are verified more slowly and less accurately than closely-matched intuitive statements like "bricks have weight" (Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012). Here, we investigate how context and instruction influences this conflict. In Study 1, college undergraduates (n = 100) verified scientific statements interspersed with images intended to prime either a scientific interpretation of the statements or an intuitive one. Participants primed with scientific images verified counterintuitive statements more accurately, but no more quickly, than those primed with intuitive images. In Study 2, college undergraduates (n = 138) received instruction that affirmed the scientific aspects of the target domain and refuted common misconceptions. Instruction increased the accuracy of participants' responses to counterintuitive statements but not the speed of their responses. Collectively, these findings indicate that scientific interpretations of a domain can be prioritized over intuitive ones but the conflict between science and intuition cannot be eliminated altogether.

Having less means wanting more: Children hold an intuitive economic theory of diminishing marginal utility

Judgments surrounding resource acquisition and valuation are ubiquitous in daily life. How do humans decide what something is worth to themselves or someone else? One important cue to value is that of resource quantity. As described by economists, the principle of diminishing marginal utility (DMU) holds that as resource abundance increases, the value placed on each unit decreases; likewise, when resources become more scarce, the value placed on each unit rises. While prior research suggests that adults make judgments that align with this concept, it is unclear whether children do so. In Study 1 (n = 104), children (ages 5 through 8) were presented with scenarios involving losses or gains to others' resources and predicted the actions and emotions of the individuals involved. Participants made decisions that aligned with DMU, e.g., expecting individuals with fewer resources to expend more effort for an additional resource than individuals with greater resources. In Study 2 (n = 104), children incorporated information about preferences when inferring others' resource valuations, showing how quantity and preference are both included in children's inferences about others' utility. Our results indicate the early emergence of an intuitive economic theory that aligns with an important economic principle. Long before formal learning on this topic, children integrate quantity and preference information to sensibly predict others' resource valuations, with implications for economic decision-making, social preferences, and judgments of partner quality across the lifespan.

All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities

Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining the abstract and causal structure of complex, unobservable, and uncertain phenomena that have substantial impacts on fitness. Specifically, we argue that (1) mental representations about the abstract vs. the supernatural are largely overlapping, if not identical, and (2) when the data-generating processes for scarce and ambiguous observations are complex and opaque, a naive observer can improve a bias-variance trade-off by starting with a simple, underspecified explanation that Western observers readily interpret as "supernatural." We then argue that (3) in many cases, knowledge specialists across cultures offer pragmatic services that involve apparently supernatural explanations, and their clients are frequently willing to pay them in a market for useful and effective services. We propose that at least some ethnographic descriptions of religion might actually reflect ordinary and adaptive responses to novel problems such as illnesses and natural disasters, where knowledge specialists possess and apply the best available explanations about phenomena that would otherwise be completely mysterious and unpredictable.

Toward an Account of Intuitive Time

People hold intuitive theories of the physical world, such as theories of matter, energy, and motion, in the sense that they have a coherent conceptual structure supporting a network of beliefs about the domain. It is not yet clear whether people can also be said to hold a shared intuitive theory of time. Yet, philosophical debates about the metaphysical nature of time often revolve around the idea that people hold one or more “common sense” assumptions about time: that there is an objective “now”; that the past, present, and future are fundamentally different in nature; and that time passes or flows. We empirically explored the question of whether people indeed share some or all of these assumptions by asking adults to what extent they agreed with a set of brief statements about time. Across two analyses, subsets of people's beliefs about time were found consistently to covary in ways that suggested stable underlying conceptual dimensions related to aspects of the “common sense” assumptions described by philosophers. However, distinct subsets of participants showed three mutually incompatible profiles of response, the most frequent of which did not closely match all of philosophers’ claims about common sense time. These exploratory studies provide a useful starting point in attempts to characterize intuitive theories of time.

Neurodualism: People Assume that the Brain Affects the Mind more than the Mind Affects the Brain

People commonly think of the mind and the brain as distinct entities that interact, a view known as dualism. At the same time, the public widely acknowledges that science attributes all mental phenomena to the workings of a material brain, a view at odds with dualism. How do people reconcile these conflicting perspectives? We propose that people distort claims about the brain from the wider culture to fit their dualist belief that minds and brains are distinct, interacting entities: Exposure to cultural discourse about the brain as the physical basis for the mind prompts people to posit that mind-brain interactions are asymmetric, such that the brain is able to affect the mind more than vice versa. We term this hybrid intuitive theory neurodualism. Five studies involving both thought experiments and naturalistic scenarios provided evidence of neurodualism among laypeople and, to some extent, even practicing psychotherapists. For example, lay participants reported that "a change in a person's brain" is accompanied by "a change in the person's mind" more often than vice versa. Similarly, when asked to imagine that "future scientists were able to alter exactly 25% of a person's brain," participants reported larger corresponding changes in the person's mind than in the opposite direction. Participants also showed a similarly asymmetric pattern favoring the brain over the mind in naturalistic scenarios. By uncovering people's intuitive theories of the mind-brain relation, the results provide insights into societal phenomena such as the allure of neuroscience and common misperceptions of mental health treatments.

Intuitive sociology

How do humans intuitively understand the structure of their society? How should psychologists study people's commonsense understanding of societal structure? The present chapter seeks to address both of these questions by describing the domain of "intuitive sociology." Drawing primarily from empirical research focused on how young children represent and reason about social groups, we propose that intuitive sociology consists of three core phenomena: social types (the identification of relevant groups and their attributes); social value (the worth of different groups); and social norms (shared expectations for how groups ought to be). After articulating each component of intuitive sociology, we end the chapter by considering both the emergence of intuitive sociology in infancy as well as transitions from intuitive to reflective representations of sociology later in life.

Groups as institutions: The use of constitutive rules to attribute group membership

Across four experiments we tested children's (N = 229, aged 4-9) beliefs about what makes an individual a member of a group. One model (groups as institutions) predicts children believe groups are based on constitutive rules, i.e. collectively agreed-upon rules that ground membership. Another model (groups as social network) predicts children believe groups are based on patterns of social relationships. We tested whether and to what extent children rely on constitutive rules to attribute group membership. We found that young children can reason about constitutive rules as a means of becoming a group member, and their reasoning about constitutive rules is relatively sophisticated (Studies 1-3). But, when constitutive rules are pitted against friendship, young children (4-5) prioritize friendship and older children (6-9) prioritize constitutive rules. Therefore, both models contribute to the understanding of children's concepts of social groups across development.

Competing Explanations of Competing Explanations: Accounting for Conflict Between Scientific and Folk Explanations

People who hold scientific explanations for natural phenomena also hold folk explanations, and the two types of explanations compete under some circumstances. Here, we explore the question of why folk explanations persist in the face of a well-understood scientific alternative, a phenomenon known as explanatory coexistence. We consider two accounts: an associative account, where coexistence is driven by low-level associations between co-occurring ideas in experience or discourse, and a theory-based account, where coexistence reflects high-level competition between distinct sets of causal expectations. We present data that assess the relative contributions of these two accounts to the cognitive conflict elicited by counterintuitive scientific ideas. Participants (134 college undergraduates) verified scientific statements like "air has weight" and "bacteria have DNA" as quickly as possible, and we examined the speed and accuracy of their verifications in relation to measures of associative information (lexical co-occurrence of the statements' subjects and predicates) and theory-based expectations (ratings of whether the statements' subjects possess theory-relevant attributes). Both measures explained a significant amount of variance in participants' responses, but the theory-based measures explained three to five times more. These data suggest that the cognitive conflict elicited by counterintuitive scientific ideas typically arises from competing theories and that such ideas might be made more intuitive by strengthening scientific theories or weakening folk theories.

Mutual intentions as a causal framework for social groups

Children's early emerging intuitive theories are specialized for different conceptual domains. Recently attention has turned to children's concepts of social groups, finding that children believe that many social groups mark uniquely social information such as allegiances and obligations. But another critical component of intuitive theories, the causal beliefs that underlie category membership, has received less attention. We propose that children believe membership in these groups is constituted by mutual intentions: i.e., all group members (including the individual) intend for an individual to be a member and all group members (including the individual) have common knowledge of these intentions. Children in a broad age range (4-9) applied a mutual-intentional framework to newly encountered social groups early in development (Experiment 1, 2, 4). Further, they deploy this mutual-intentional framework selectively, withholding it from essentialized social categories such as gender (Experiment 3). Mutual intentionality appears to be a vital aspect of children's naïve sociology.

Moral learning as intuitive theory revision

We argue that moral learning, like much of conceptual development more generally, involves development and change in children's intuitive theories of the world. Children's intuitive theories involve coherent and abstract representations of the world, which point to domain-specific, unobservable causal-explanatory entities. From this perspective, children rely on intuitive sociological theories (in particular, an abstract expectation that group memberships constrain people's obligations), and their intuitive psychological theories (including expectations that mental states motivate individual behavior) to predict, explain, and evaluate morally-relevant action. Thus, moral learning involves development and change in each of these theories of the world across childhood, as well as developmental change in how children integrate information from these two intuitive theories. This perspective is supported by a series of research studies on young children's moral reasoning and learning, and compared to other developmental approaches, including more traditional forms of constructivism and more recent nativist perspectives.

Behavioral avoidance of contagion in childhood

Although there is a large literature on children's reasoning about contagion, there has been no empirical research on children's avoidance of contagious individuals. This study is the first to investigate whether children avoid sick individuals. Participants (4- to 7-year-old children) were invited to play with two confederates-one of whom was "sick." Afterward, their knowledge of contagion was assessed. Overall, children avoided proximity to and contact with the sick confederate and her toys, but only 6- and 7-year-olds performed above chance. The best predictor of avoidance behavior was not age but rather children's ability to make predictions about illness outcomes. This provides the first evidence of behavioral avoidance of contagious illness in childhood and suggests that causal knowledge underlies avoidance behavior.

Children's explanations as a window into their intuitive theories of the social world

Social categorization is an early emerging and robust component of social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of the social world has remained unclear. The present studies examined children's (N = 52 four- and five-year olds) explanations of social behavior to provide a window into their intuitive theories of how social categories constrain human action. Children systematically referenced category memberships and social relationships as causal-explanatory factors for specific types of social interactions: harm among members of different categories more than harm among members of the same category. In contrast, they systematically referred to agents' mental states to explain the reverse patterns of behaviors: harm among members of the same category more than harm among members of different categories. These data suggest that children view social category memberships as playing a causal-explanatory role in constraining social interactions.