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Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
How Not To Teach A Class, Andrew Shtulman
Cognitive Parallels Between Moral Judgment And Modal Judgement, Andrew Shtulman, Lester Tong
Cognitive Parallels Between Moral Judgment And Modal Judgement, Andrew Shtulman, Lester Tong
Andrew Shtulman
A central question in the study of moral psychology is how immediate intuition interacts with more thoughtful deliberation in the generation of moral judgments. The present study sheds additional light on this question by comparing adults’ judgments of moral permissibility with their judgments of physical possibility—a form of judgment that also involves the coordination of intuition and deliberation (Shtulman, Cognitive Development 24:293–309, 2009 ). Participants ( N = 146) were asked to judge the permissibility of 16 extraordinary actions (e.g., Is it ever morally permissible for an 80-year-old woman to have sex with a 20-year-old man?) and the possibility of …
Tuition Vs. Intuition: Effects Of Instruction On Naïve Theories Of Evolution., Andrew Shtulman, Prassede Calabi
Tuition Vs. Intuition: Effects Of Instruction On Naïve Theories Of Evolution., Andrew Shtulman, Prassede Calabi
Andrew Shtulman
Recent research suggests that a major obstacle to evolution understanding is an essentialist view of the biological world. The present study investigated the effects of formal biology instruction on such misconceptions. Participants (N = 291) completed an assessment of their understanding of six aspects of evolution (variation, inheritance, adaptation, domestication, speciation, and extinction) before and after one of six evolutionary-themed courses. Most participants demonstrated pervasive misconceptions at both pretest and posttest. A subset, however, demonstrated reliable pre-post gains, and they differed from their peers in that they (a) began the semester with significantly less accurate, yet significantly more consistent, views …
Epistemic Similarities Between Students' Scientific And Supernatural Beliefs., Andrew Shtulman
Epistemic Similarities Between Students' Scientific And Supernatural Beliefs., Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
The evidential support for scientific claims is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to that for supernatural claims, yet students may not appreciate this difference in light of the fact that both types of claims are learned in similar ways (through testimony rather than firsthand observation) and perform similar functions (explaining observed phenomena in terms of unobservable entities). The present study addressed this issue by comparing students’ scientific beliefs with their supernatural beliefs along 4 dimensions of epistemic import: personal confidence, perceived consensus, means of justification, and openness to revision. Participants’ scientific beliefs were strongly differentiated from their supernatural beliefs along the …
Parent-Child Conversations About Evolution In The Context Of An Interactive Museum Display, Andrew Shtulman, Isabel Checa
Parent-Child Conversations About Evolution In The Context Of An Interactive Museum Display, Andrew Shtulman, Isabel Checa
Andrew Shtulman
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 the public – 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 one accompanying 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. …
Scientific Knowledge Suppresses But Does Not Supplant Earlier Intuitions, Andrew Shtulman, Joshua Valcarcel
Scientific Knowledge Suppresses But Does Not Supplant Earlier Intuitions, Andrew Shtulman, Joshua Valcarcel
Andrew Shtulman
When students learn scientific theories that conflict with their earlier, naïve theories, what happens to the earlier theories? Are they overwritten or merely suppressed? We investigated this question by devising and implementing a novel speeded-reasoning task. Adults with many years of science education verified two types of statements as quickly as possible: statements whose truth value was the same across both naïve and scientific theories of a particular phenomenon (e.g., “The moon revolves around the Earth”) and statements involving the same conceptual relations but whose truth value differed across those theories (e.g., “The Earth revolves around the sun”). Participants verified …
Cognitive Constraints On The Understanding And Acceptance Of Evolution, Andrew Shtulman, Prassede Calabi
Cognitive Constraints On The Understanding And Acceptance Of Evolution, Andrew Shtulman, Prassede Calabi
Andrew Shtulman
No abstract provided.
Why People Do Not Understand Evolution: An Analysis Of The Cognitive Barriers To Fully Grasping The Unity Of Life, Andrew Shtulman
Why People Do Not Understand Evolution: An Analysis Of The Cognitive Barriers To Fully Grasping The Unity Of Life, Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
No abstract provided.
The Development Of Possibility Judgment Within And Across Domains, Andrew Shtulman
The Development Of Possibility Judgment Within And Across Domains, Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
The ability to differentiate possible events from impossible ones is an invaluable skill when reasoning about claims that transcend the perceptual evidence at hand, yet preschool-aged children do not readily make this differentiation when reasoning about physically extraordinary events [Shtulman, A., & Carey, S. (2007). Improbable or impossible? How children reason about the possibility of extraordinary claims. Child Development, 78, 1015–1032]. The present study sought to determine whether this failure stems from deficits in domain-specific knowledge or deficits in the domain-general procedure by which possibility judgments are made. Participants (48 children aged 4-9 years olds and 16 adults) were asked …
Rethinking The Role Of Resubsumption In Conceptual Change., Andrew Shtulman
Rethinking The Role Of Resubsumption In Conceptual Change., Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
Why is conceptual change difficult yet possible? Ohlsson (2009/this issue) proposes that the answer can be found in the dynamics of resubsumption, or the process by which a domain of experience is resubsumed under an intuitive theory originally constructed to explain some other domain of experience. Here, it is argued that conceptual change is difficult in two distinct senses—that is, difficult to initiate and difficult to complete—and that Ohlsson's proposal addresses the latter but not the former. The implications of this argument for how conceptual change might be best facilitated in the science classroom are discussed as well.
Variation In The Anthropomorphization Of Supernatural Beings And Its Implications For Cognitive Theories Of Religion., Andrew Shtulman
Variation In The Anthropomorphization Of Supernatural Beings And Its Implications For Cognitive Theories Of Religion., Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
The cognitive study of religion has been highly influenced by P. Boyer's (2001, 2003) claim that supernatural beings are conceptualized as persons with counterintuitive properties. The present study tests the generality of this claim by exploring how different supernatural beings are conceptualized by the same individual and how different individuals conceptualize the same supernatural beings. In Experiment 1, college undergraduates decided whether three types of human properties (psychological, biological, physical) could or could not be attributed to two types of supernatural beings (religious, fictional). On average, participants attributed more human properties to fictional beings, like fairies and vampires, than to …
The Relation Between Essentialist Beliefs And Evolutionary Reasoning, Andrew Shtulman, Laura Schulz
The Relation Between Essentialist Beliefs And Evolutionary Reasoning, Andrew Shtulman, Laura Schulz
Andrew Shtulman
Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection. The present study investigated whether such beliefs are impediments to learning this concept as well. Participants (43 children aged 4–9 and 34 adults) were asked to judge the variability of various behavioral and anatomical properties across different members of the same species. Adults who accepted within-species variation—both actual and potential—were significantly more likely to demonstrate a selection-based understanding of evolution than adults who denied within-species variation. The latter demonstrated an alternative, incorrect understanding of evolution and produced response patterns that were …
The Development Of Core Knowledge Domains, Andrew Shtulman
The Development Of Core Knowledge Domains, Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
No abstract provided.
Imagination Is Only As Rational As The Purpose To Which It Is Put, Andrew Shtulman
Imagination Is Only As Rational As The Purpose To Which It Is Put, Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
No abstract provided.
Improbable Or Impossible? How Children Reason About The Possibility Of Extraordinary Events, Andrew Shtulman, Susan Carey
Improbable Or Impossible? How Children Reason About The Possibility Of Extraordinary Events, Andrew Shtulman, Susan Carey
Andrew Shtulman
The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, children frequently denied the possibility of events that adults judged improbable but not impossible. Three additional experiments varied the manner in which possibility judgments were elicited and confirmed the robustness of preschoolers' tendency to judge improbable events impossible. Overall, it is argued that children initially …
Qualitative Differences Between Naïve And Scientific Theories Of Evolution, Andrew Shtulman
Qualitative Differences Between Naïve And Scientific Theories Of Evolution, Andrew Shtulman
Andrew Shtulman
Philosophers of biology have long argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution was qualitatively different from all earlier theories of evolution. Whereas Darwin’s predecessors and contemporaries explained adaptation as the transformation of a species’ “essence,” Darwin explained adaptation as the selective propagation of randomly occurring mutations within a population. The present study explored the possibility of a parallel between early “transformational” theories of evolution and modern naïve theories. Forty-two high school and college students and three evolutionary biologists were tested on their understanding of six evolutionary phenomena: variation, inheritance, adaptation, domestication, speciation, and extinction. As predicted, a plurality of participants demonstrated …
The Intelligent Design Controversy: Lessons From Psychology And Education., Andrew Shtulman, Tania Lombrozo, Michael Weisberg
The Intelligent Design Controversy: Lessons From Psychology And Education., Andrew Shtulman, Tania Lombrozo, Michael Weisberg
Andrew Shtulman
No abstract provided.