Poster #31 - Is Empiricism Innate? Adults and Children’s Beliefs about the Origins of Human Knowledge

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Where does human knowledge come from? This question has been central to philosophical and scientific inquiry for thousands of years, with lively debate over which aspects of knowledge are innate versus learned through experience. The debate continues to motivate research in developmental psychology and related fields; however, the question of where our knowledge originates is also intuitively accessible and interesting to non-scientists. Despite this, little is known about where non-specialists think knowledge comes from. Do people naturally explain the origins of knowledge using a nature-nurture distinction? If so, are people biased to favor a particular answer?

To test this, in Experiment 1, we probed naïve adults’ (N = 101) beliefs about origins of various perceptual and cognitive abilities. These included the ability to see and hear, to think hidden objects still exist, to tell approximately 10 items from approximately 20, and others (abilities were chosen because all have been well studied in development). For each, we asked participants to indicate the age at which the ability first emerges by clicking a timeline (Figure 1B), and to describe the ability’s origins by typing a free response to the prompt “How come someone can X (e.g., think a hidden object still exists)?” Responses were coded into endorsements of innateness (e.g., being born with the ability or the ability emerging through biological maturation) or endorsements of learning (e.g., learning through observation or teaching by others) (Figure 1A).

Adults uniformly agreed that some perceptual abilities are innate (e.g., seeing) and that some cognitive abilities are learned (e.g., reading). Critically, for a suite of “core cognition” abilities that have been demonstrated in very young infants and non-human species, adults consistently indicated that these emerge later than the ages suggested by scientific research (all ps < .001), and they generally appealed to learning and instruction, rather than genes or innateness, as the source of the abilities’ origins (ps < .001) (Figure 1B).

We found that this empiricist bias about the origins of human knowledge was also true of adults from a distant culture (Experiment 2), 5- to 8- year old children (Experiment 3), and professional scientists including psychologists (Experiment 4). However, when asked about the same abilities in non-human animal species, we found that adults and children were much less empiricist, readily offering nativist explanations for animal abilities, but empiricist explanations for the same abilities in humans (Experiment 5). Moreover, adults showed no empiricist bias when asked about temperament traits in humans, including reactivity, positive affect, and activity level (Experiment 6) (N = 786 for Experiments 2-6). These findings suggest that people tend toward intuitive empiricism when thinking about the origins of human knowledge. This empiricist bias appears specific to humans-- it was not observed for animal knowledge, and to knowledge—it was not observed for temperament traits. This widespread bias may have adaptive benefit for pedagogy. However, because it also may color our scientific commitments, it will be important for future work to characterize its effects on both intuitive and formal scientific thinking.

Authors

• Jinjing Jenny Wang, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Lisa Feigenson, Johns Hopkins University
  Non-Presenting Author