Cognitive Conflict Between Science and Intuition Across the Curriculum and Across the Life-Span

• In Event: Promoting Public Understanding of Science: A Cornerstone of Diverse Democracies

Abstract

Three decades of research in cognitive development and science education have shown that students enter the science classroom with rich, though generally inaccurate, theories of everyday phenomena that can interfere with learning more accurate theories of the same domain. Physics students, for example, hold theories of motion predicated on the belief that forces are transferred from one object to another upon contact and must dissipate before objects can come to a rest (McCloskey, 1983). And biology students hold theories of adaptation predicated on the belief that all members of a species evolve together, with each organism producing offspring better adapted to the environment than it was at birth (Shtulman, 2006). Science educators are thus charged with two tasks: not only must they help students learn new, scientific theories but they must also help students unlearn their preexisting, intuitive theories. This process has typically been thought of in terms of replacement, with scientific theories overwriting intuitive theories, but I will present several studies suggesting that our intuitive theories are never fully overwritten.

The task we used to document this phenomenon was a statement verification task. Participants were are asked to verify, as quickly as possible, two types of scientific statements: statements that are consistent with intuition (e.g., “the moon revolves around the Earth,” “heat increases an object’s temperature,” “genes that code for eye color can be found in the eye”) and statements involving the same concepts but that are inconsistent with intuition (e.g., “the Earth revolves around the sun,” “heat increases an object’s size,” “genes that code for eye color can be found in the liver”). The logic behind this design is that if intuitive theories survive the acquisition of mutually incompatible scientific theories, then the latter should cause greater cognitive conflict than the former, resulting in (a) slower verifications and (b) less accurate verifications.

Using this method, we have observed long-term conflict between science and intuition in ten domains of knowledge: astronomy, evolution, fractions, genetics, germs, matter, mechanics, physiology, thermodynamics, and waves (Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012). We have also observed such conflict for several groups of participants: college humanities majors, college science majors, older adults working in non-scientific professions, and older adults working in science-related professions (Shtulman & Harrington, in press). Indeed, science professors with three or more decades of career experience were no faster on our statement-verification task than were the college undergraduates in their courses. Overall, these findings imply that intuitive theories are suppressed by scientific theories but not supplanted by them. The two theories coexist side-by-side, influencing our reasoning about natural phenomena for several decades. These findings have strong implications for public understanding of science because they suggest that the goal of science education should not be to replace intuitive theories with scientific theories but to teach students when and how to discriminate between the two types of theories. Awareness of their coexistence may provide at least some immunity to the sway that intuitive theories hold over attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors better informed by scientific theories. (498 words)

Author

• Andrew Shtulman, Occidental College