Maybe some of you remember believing it's Sun revolving around the Earth. The Sun is so small in the sky and we can't feel any rotation, can we? This kind of theory that people naturally hold without scientific education and cultural influence is called the naive theory. Later we came to school, learned that it's actually the other way around, our old theory got replaced and we can laugh at stupid Americans till the end of our days.
At least that's what our naive theory of learning predicts. However, it seems science will once again teach us otherwise. Recent study says it seems the naive childhood beliefs aren't replaced by new scientific facts but merely suppressed.
Implicit in the idea of knowledge restructuring is the idea that early modes of thought, once restructured, should no longer be accessible, for the basic constituents of the earlier system are no longer represented. A number of recent findings have challenged this idea, however, by showing that early modes of thought do sometimes reemerge later in life. Alzheimer’s patients, for instance, have been shown to endorse teleological explanations for natural phenomena that typically only children endorse (Lombrozo, Kelemen, & Zaitchik, 2007). While adults without Alzheimer’s disease do not typically endorse these explanations, they can be induced to do so under speeded conditions (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009). Adults have also been shown to be slower and less accurate at categorizing plants as alive than at categorizing animals as alive (Goldberg & Thompson-Schill, 2009), reminiscent of young children’s belief that animate entities are alive but inanimate entities are not (Piaget, 1929). Even biology professors were found to be slower and less accurate at classifying plants as alive than at classifying animals as alive, implying that years of professional experience had not erased an erroneous distinction first drawn in childhood (Goldberg & Thompson-Schill, 2009).
In this study researches made up a set of statements about the world. In half of them, naive theory predicted different answer than later-learnt scientific theory (inconsistent), in the other half both theories predicted the same answer (consistent).
Example of statements used in the study:
naive t. scientifc t. statement
True True Ovens produce heat
False False Rain produces heat
True False Coats produce heat*
False True Pressure produces heat*
False False Rain produces heat
True False Coats produce heat*
False True Pressure produces heat*
________
* - inconsistent
Participants had to judge if the statement is true or false while both their reaction time and accuracy were measured. The idea was that if naive theories were later overwritten by scientific theories during the learning process (naive belief was erased), nothing would interfere with application of the correct scientific theory and reaction times to consistent and inconsistent statements would not differ.
This null hypothesis was disproved and reaction times to consistent items differed significantly from the inconsistent items. Another finding was that participants were more accurate in judging statements in which conceptual change occurs during the first decade of life.
One possibility how to explain these findings is that naive beliefs are simply more familiar. However, this seems to be disproved by another effect observed during the study - reaction time was actually longer in areas where participants displayed more expertise (measured by their accuracy). This effect has to be investigated further.
I think these findings can have a lot of interesting application. This blog already deals with the importance of willingness to abandon old beliefs and the role of confusion in this process. My own thoughts aim more in the direction of psychology of religion:
Is religion also supported by naive beliefs? Can there be something like a naive belief in deities present in all of our brains, while atheists only suppress it by learned information? Or is it the other way around?
Can prejudices count as naive theories? If so, are they not outrootable? Can we ever really cancel out the effects of first impression? Are we going to believe Americans are stupid forever?
Tell us what you think below!
Andrew Shtulman, Joshua Valcarcel: Scientific knowledge suppresses but does not supplant earlier intuitions
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