Parent-child conversations about evolution in the context of an interactive museum display

The theory of evolution by natural selection has revolutionized the biological sciences yet remains confusing and controversial to the public at large. This study explored how a particular segment of thepublic – visitors to a natural history museum – reason about evolution in the context of an interactive cladogram, or evolutionary tree. The participants were 49 children aged four to twelve and oneaccompanying parent. Together, they completed five activities using a touch-screen display of the phylogenetic relations among the 19 orders of mammals. Across activities, participants revealed similar misconceptions to those revealed by college undergraduates in previous studies. However, the frequency of those misconceptions was attenuated by the level of parental engagement, particularlythe frequency of turn-taking between parents and children. Overall, these findings suggest that evolutionary reasoning may be improved by the kinds of collaborative discussions fostered by interactive museum displays, so long as the affordances of those displays encourage multi-user interactions

The plausible impossible:Graded notions of impossibility across cultures

Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition, impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some violations as “more impossible” than others (Shtulman & Morgan, 2017). When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells, American adults are influenced by seemingly irrelevant considerations, judging, for instance, that it would be more difficult to levitate a bowling ball than a basketball even though weight should no longer be a consideration if contact is no longer necessary for support. Here, we explore these effects in a non-Western context—China—where magical events are represented differently in fiction and reasoning styles are often more holistic than analytic. Across several studies, Chinese adults showed the same tendency as American adults to honor implicit causal constraints when evaluating the plausibility of magical events. These findings suggest that graded notions of impossibility are shared across cultures, possibly because they are a byproduct of causal knowledge

The Intelligent Design Controversy: Lesson From Psychology and Education

The current debate over whether to teach Intelligent Design creationism in American public schools provides the rare opportunity to watch the interaction between scientific knowledge and intuitive beliefs play out in courts rather than cortex. While it’s easy to believe the controversy stems only from ignorance about evolution, a closer look confirms what decades of research in cognitive and social psychology have already taught us: that the relationship between understanding a claim and believing a claim is far from simple. Research in education and psychology confirms that a majority of college students fail to understand evolutionary theory, but also finds no support for a relationship between understanding evolutionary theory and accepting it as true [1, 2]. We believe the intuitive appeal of Intelligent Design owes as much to misconceptions about science and morality as it does to misconceptions about evolution. To support this position we present a brief tour of misconceptions: evolutionary, scientific, and moral

Why do logically incompatible beliefs seem psychologically compatible?: Science, pseudoscience, religion, and superstition

Humans’ understanding of science is at once impressive and appalling. Humans, as a species, have uncovered the hidden causes of most natural phenomena, from rainbows to influenza to earthquakes. Unobservable causal agents, like germs and genes, have been discovered and studied and are now familiar to everyone, scientists and nonscientists alike. Representations at different levels of abstraction may be compatible, as when represent the diffusion of a gas at both the macroscopic level and the microscopic level. Likewise, representations that evoke different scales of causation may be compatible, as when we represent sexual behavior as both an evolved adaptation and an environmentally-triggered response. A dominant source of non-scientific explanations is religion. Religious explanations for natural phenomena typically evoke supernatural agents, which, in turn, evoke intuitions about agents in general -theory of mind. Consider the difference between scientific and religious explanations for why organisms are adapted to their environment

Bridging a Conceptual Divide: How Peer Collaboration Facilitates Science Learning

Collaboration is generally an effective means of learning new information, but is collaboration productive in domains where collaborators may hold qualitatively different conceptions of the domain’s causal structure? We explored this question in the domain of evolutionary biology, where previous research has shown that most individuals construe evolution as the uniform transformation of an entire population (akin to metamorphosis) rather than the selective survival and reproduction of a subset of the population. College undergraduates (n = 44) completed an assessment of their evolutionary reasoning by themselves (pretest), with a partner (dyad test), and several weeks later (posttest). Collaboration proved ineffective for the higher- scoring partner in each dyad, as their scores generally remained unchanged from pretest to dyad test to posttest, but it proved effective for the lower-scoring partner. Not only did lower- scoring partners increase their score from pretest to dyad test, but they maintained higher scores at posttest as well. Follow- up analyses revealed that participants’ posttest scores were predicted by their partners’ pretest scores but only for lower- scoring partners, and the relation was negative: the smaller the difference between pretest score, the greater the gain from pretest to posttest for lower-scoring partners. These findings indicate that collaboration in domains characterized by conceptual change is possible, but that learning from such collaboration is asymmetric (i.e., individuals with low levels of understanding benefit more than their partners do) and unequal (i.e., individuals with low levels of understanding benefit more if their partner’s understanding is only moderately higher). Thus, bridging the gap between a novice’s view of a conceptually complex domain and an expert’s view appears to require instruction more aligned with the former than the latter

Theories of God: Explanatory Coherence in a Non-Scientific Domain

Public representations of God range from the highly anthropomorphic to the highly abstract, and the present study explored whether differences in the interpretation of those representations are correlated with differences in one’s religious beliefs and religious practices more generally. American adults of varying ages and religious backgrounds completed a questionnaire that probed their beliefs about a wide range of religious matters, including prayer, ritual, worship, sin, cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, angels, Satan, Heaven, and Hell. Participants were divided into two groups based on their propensity to anthropomorphize God in a property-attribution task, and their responses were analyzed for internal consistency. Overall, the two groups exhibited explanatorily coherent, yet qualitatively different, patterns of beliefs and practices – patterns interpreted contrastively as a “humanistic theology ” and an “existential theology. ” These findings suggest that individuals ’ religious beliefs are organized in a theory-like manner despite their lack of direct perceptual support