Most people are familiar with the word ‘theory’ in the context of science, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity or Wegener’s plate tectonic theory of continental drift. These are formal scientific theories that have been worked out, discussed, written about, tested, and argued over by hundreds of educated adults. By contrast, children’s intuitive theories are spontaneous and naive. However, children do share one interesting property with scientists. Both children and scientists are stubborn when it comes to changing their minds.
CAUGHT IN THE GRIP OF A THEORY
Academics love witty titles for their scientific papers. It not only livens up what could be a very dry piece of writing, but it demonstrates that even scientists can have a sense of humour. In a paper entitled ‘If You Want to Get Ahead, Get a Theory’, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Barbel Inhelder describe how children appear to reason in a theory-like way when trying to solve everyday physics problems.35 The pun is on getting ‘a head’, which of course can mean either get an advantage or the bony box that houses our brain. However, the paper also makes a very serious point about the role of intuitive theories in intellectual development.
In their study, four-, six-, and eight-year-olds were given wooden rods of different lengths to balance. Imagine trying to balance a ruler on a pencil. How would you go about it? I bet that you would estimate where the middle of the ruler is and balance it on the pencil at this point, which would be the correct solution. The children also balanced the rods in the middle. However, when given rods that were secretly weighted at one end so that they could not balance in the middle, something interesting happened. Initially, all of the children tried to balance these in the middle, but of course they failed. The eldest children looked confused at first, but then realized something was not quite right. They then shifted the rod until they found the point of balance. The youngest children did not seem surprised by the weighted rods and again found the point of balance by moving the rods until they balanced. In contrast, the six-year-olds failed miserably at the task.
Over and over again, the six-year-olds placed the rod in the middle, and every time the rod tipped over. They were so sure that the rods must balance in the middle that they persisted with the strategy until they eventually got frustrated, threw the rods down, and stormed off say-ing that the task was impossible. They were so convinced by the theory that things balance in the middle that they were unable to see that there might be exceptions. This was their theory of balance and, like stubborn adults who refuse to abandon ideas when they are proven wrong, they were unable to be flexible in their behaviour.
Unlike the six-year-olds, the younger children did not have any theory or expectations. They just approached and solved the problem through trial and error. The older children had a theory and also predicted the rods should balance in the middle. However, on discovering this was not so, they had the mental flexibility to realize that sometimes there are exceptions in life. The inflexible six-year-olds were caught in the grip of a theory.
Ten years ago, I discovered a similar phenomenon.36 Imagine a flexible tube like the one on a vacuum cleaner. Now imagine the tube connected from a chimney to a box below. If I dropped a ball down the chimney, you would know to search for it in the box. You would predict that the ball would fall down the tube into the box. Now imagine that I put a bend in the tube so that the box is not directly below the chimney anymore. If I drop a ball down the chimney, where would you look for it now? In the box of course, because the box is connected to the chimney. What could be easier?
Remarkably, this is something that pre-school children find difficult. They search for the ball directly below. They will search underneath over and over again, even though you can show them each time that it is in the box connected to the chimney by the tube. What’s going on?
This weird ‘gravity error’ reveals some interesting things about the minds of young children. The first is that they reason in a theory-like way. They try to apply the knowledge they already possess to make sense of and predict what might happen next. Just like reticent old scientists, they don’t want to believe the evidence when it conflicts with what they expected. All that practice with pushing things off the high chair as an infant has led them to a theory that all objects fall straight down. But when objects don’t behave as expected, young children persist with the theory and think something is wrong with the setup. This is because they have trouble ignoring intuitive beliefs.
FIG. 7: The tubes apparatus. Children typically search directly below. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
Humans share the gravity error with chimpanzees, monkeys, and dogs, which have all been tested on tubes.37 Only dogs seem to learn the correct solution relatively quickly. Are they smarter than young children and primates? Probably not. I think they are more flexible on this task because they don’t hold such a strong belief in falling objects in the first place. They are like the four-year-olds on the task of balancing the ruler – not particularly committed to one solution over another.
Eventually children can learn to ignore the gravity error, but even adults can trip up on it. This brings us back to one of the central points in this book. Early ideas may never be truly abandoned. Consider another example from the world of falling objects. What happens to a cannonball fired from the edge of a cliff? Visualize it for a moment. What path would it take? Most pre-school children think that, just like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, the cannonball would travel forward until it loses momentum and then drop straight down.38 Such beliefs can still operate in adults. If you ask adults what path a bomb takes when dropped from a plane, most of them think that it falls straight down, and they behave accordingly.39 In games where adults have to release a tennis ball to fall into a cup as they walk by, they typically overshoot because they try to release the ball when directly above the cup.40 In both examples, the motion is actually a curve, but our childish, naive straight-down theory still operates. These examples show that intuitive theories are not always abandoned when we become adults. If such naive physical reasoning reveals that childish beliefs lurk in adults, what happens if those beliefs are supernatural?
CHILDREN AS INTUITIVE MAGICIANS
When does supernatural thinking first appear? So far in this chapter I have been describing how infants understand the natural world. This process begins long before education has any role to play. Children chop the world of experience up into different categories of things and events. To make sense of it all, they generate naive theories that explain the physical world, the living world, and eventually the psychological world of other people. While children’s naive theories are often correct, they can be wrong because the causes and mechanisms they are trying to reason about are invisible. For example, no one can see gravity, but you can assume that something makes objects fall straight down if they are released. Or consider an example from biology. We can easily recognize when something is alive. You can tell by how it looks and more importantly by how it moves, but you can’t actually see life in something. All you can do is infer it, and sometimes you will be wrong. Sometimes things do not always fall straight down. Sometimes living things do not move, and sometimes moving things are not alive. When we misapply the property of one natural kind to another, we are thinking unnaturally. If we continue to believe it is true, then our thinking has become supernatural. This is where I think our supersense comes from. Let me unpack this important idea for you further.