Scales Means Reptile: The Role Of Essentialist Thinking As A Barrier To Integration

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Essentialist thinking refers to informal, intuitive, and rigidly held ways of understanding the world, employed as a tool to reduce the complexity of information to manageable chunks. In essentialist thinking, underlying shared properties cause external features such that outward characteristics of members of one category should be relatively uniform, static, and predictable (e.g., animals with scales are reptiles; Coley & Tanner, 2014). Essentialist thinking underlies errors in science reasoning wherein students use it as a convenient heuristic without actively reflecting or employing logic (Coley et al., 2016). Thus, essentialist thinking may be a barrier to learning new information, especially information that has misleading external features (e.g., mammal with scales). This study thus aimed to investigate whether young adults would correct errors made through essentialist thinking when presented with accurate information through expository text or whether essentialist thinking would be a persistent barrier to learning new information.

Drawings of known and unknown animals were presented in a spatial arrangement method (SpAM; see Figure 1) task. Unknown animals had physical characteristics that could be misleading (e.g., scaled mammal). Participants were to place similar animals close to each other and different animals far away from each other. Participants were then presented with expository paragraphs containing facts about each animal (including taxonomic details). After a brief delay, they completed the SpAM task a second time. Participants then answered open-ended questions pertaining to essentialist thinking.

The difference in Euclidean distance pre and post the expository information was examined, specifically whether the unknown animals were grouped according to their external features or taxonomic information. The results indicate that there was an overall propensity to group animals based on “external features” in both pre- and post-test conditions rather than integrating the taxonomic information presented in the expository text passages. Indeed, there was consistency in the placement of the animals on the grid at the pre- and post-test. For example, scaled animals were consistently grouped together regardless of taxonomy (Euclidean distance of scaled animals correlated pre- and post-test; r = .77, p < .001). Also, animals with misleading physical features were not moved closer to members of their taxonomic group after reading the taxonomic information [Euclidean distance between unknown animals and their taxonomic group pre- and post-test; F (1, 95) = 413, p = .52]. The results, in addition to the answers to the essentialist thinking questions, support the conclusion that essentialist thinking is being employed as a mental heuristic to expedite the process of meaning-making when confronted with seemingly disjointed information. Essentialist thinking’s embedded rigidity on cognitive faculties is therefore serving as a resistance to successful integration of new knowledge. Experiment 2, currently underway, includes a newly designed quantitative measure to determine the degree of individual variability that can be explained by essentialist thinking.
The combined findings will inform the degree to which essentialist thinking is a barrier to integrating new knowledge and impedes holistic approaches to meaning-making. They will also serve as a foundation for exploring how best to overcome this barrier in educational contexts.

Authors

• Jayantika Chakraborty, Clark University
  Presenting Author

• Matthew E Swanat, Clark University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alena G Esposito, Clark University
  Non-Presenting Author