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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 …