. What looks like play is actually experimentation. They formulate hypotheses, test them, analyse the results and revise their world view accordingly.
Effortless thinking
Sloppy thinking is at the root of many modern ills. We delve into nine key ideas that come naturally to us to find out why they are often so misguided
That may be true, but if kids are like scientists, they are rubbish ones. By the time they enter school, they have filled their heads with utter nonsense about how the world works. The job of education – especially science education – is to unlearn these “folk theories” and replace them with evidence-based ones. For most people, it doesn’t work, and even for those who go on to become scientists, it is only partially successful. No wonder the world is so full of nonsense.
Folk theories – also known as naive theories – have been . In biology, for example, young children often conflate life with movement, seeing the sun and wind as alive, but trees and mushrooms as not. They also see purpose everywhere: birds are “for” flying, rocks are for animals to scratch themselves on and rain falls so flowers can drink. In physics, children conclude that heat is a substance that flows from one place to another, that the sun moves across the sky, and so on. For most everyday purposes, these ideas are serviceable. Nevertheless, they aren’t true.
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Children cling to their folk theories, and when they encounter difficult concepts, they cling even harder. For example, many intuitively see evolution as a purposeful force that strives to endow animals and plants with the traits they need to survive. Folk theories do get knocked back as we move through education, but they never go away. “They can be suppressed by a more scientific world view, but cannot be eradicated altogether,” says Andrew Shtulman, a psychologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Intuition can be overridden but not overwritten.”
by presenting people with a variety of statements about the natural world and asking them to say which were true and which false. Some were designed to be intuitively true but scientifically false, such as “fire is composed of matter”; others were intuitively false but scientifically true, such as “air is composed of matter”. People who got the right answer still took significantly longer to process an intuitively false but scientifically true statement. This was even the case for those who had been scientists for decades.
Similar results come from brain scans. When people watch videos that are consistent with the laws of physics but intuitively wrong – such as light and heavy objects falling at the same rate – the error-detecting parts of their brains light up, suggesting that they are struggling to reconcile two competing beliefs. The disease too. Tests of their science knowledge show that they often revert to folk theories as their higher executive functions decline.
The upshot is that scientific thinking is hard-won and easily lost, and that persuading most people of the validity of things like evolution, climate change and vaccination will always be an uphill struggle.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Folk knowledge”
