LESSWRONG

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Incorrect

Sep 23, 2011

32 comments

http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/09/21/cognitive-style-tends-to-predict-religious-conviction/29646.html

Participants who gave intuitive answers to all three problems [that required reflective thinking rather than intuitive] were one and a half times as likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence as those who answered all of the questions correctly.

Importantly, researchers discovered the association between thinking styles and religious beliefs were not tied to the participants’ thinking ability or IQ.

participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.

I think this is the source but I can't be sure:

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-ofp-shenhav.pdf

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7o4/atheism_autism_spectrum/4vbc

10 points

Incorrect

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roystgnr

9 points

There's some serious spin in this paper. They use the words "intuitive" vs "reflective" to describe answers dozens of times, whereas they use "correct" vs "incorrect" less than a dozen... but reading the actual objective description of the study, it's clear that a subject who intuitively gets the correct answer gets called "reflective" in the results, whereas a subject who reflects on the problem for a while but still gets the trick incorrect answer gets called "intuitive" in the results.

I don't think the distinction between easily tricked and not easily tricked can be best described as if they were two equally valid options of "cognitive style".

9 points

4 points

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

I really don't know how people can correctly answer this on the fly! I have to solve {bat + ball = 1.10, bat = 1 + ball} to get the correct answer.

4 points

magfrump

3 points

The way I started thinking about the problem is, you've got $1.10 to spend in total. $1 is spent on the difference between the bat and the ball. That leaves $.1 which is split evenly between the bat and the ball.

So what I end up doing is, as Tordmor says below:

1.10 - 1 = .10

.10 / 2 = .05

This is essentially the explanation given by wedrifid but I wrote it before reading his and tried to format it more consistently with your comment below.

3 points

0 points

That leaves $.1 which is split evenly between the bat and the ball

Why is it split evenly? (I'm just wondering what your thought process is)

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0 points

Zetetic

1 points

I'm a bit weird with these sorts of arithmetic questions, my thought process went something like this: "Ok, 10 cents seems close, but that puts the bat at 90 cents more than the ball.. oh it seems like 5 cents and 1.05 works." The answer just sort of pops into my head, not even thinking about the division step. Of course, I could do the simple maneuvering to get the answer, but it isn't what I naturally do. I think this has to do with how I did math in grade school: I would never learn the formulas (and on top of this I would often forget my calculator) so I would rather come up with some roundabout method for approximating various calculations (like getting the root of a number by guessing numbers that "seemed close" to the root, usually starting at 1/2 the number and adjusting). Probably not really the best way to do things since there are much cleaner solutions, but this bad habit of arithmetic has sort of stuck with me through my mathematics degree (though I of course have picked up the relevant formulas by now!); instead of using the straightforward formula, I do this mental jiggling around of values and it pops into my head.

I don't know, maybe that isn't weird at all, but in any event no one has mentioned doing it yet.

1 points

juliawise

1 points

A friend tried this on three of us earlier tonight (having read the same report). One out of three (all agnostics) got it right on the fly.

1 points

Tordmor

-3 points

I have to solve {bat + ball = 1.10, bat = 1 + ball} to get the correct answer.

No you have to solve (1.10 - 1) / 2

-3 points

wedrifid

8 points

The 'No' part changes it from a clever shortcut to just being wrong. You having a more finely tuned mathematical intuition doesn't invalidate the rudimentary simultaneous equation.

8 points

jhuffman

1 points

I know that yields the correct answer but how do I know I should divide the expression by two from the problem statement?

1 points

6 points

You could just go at it the other way. Guess-and-check is one of the basic math strategies taught in schools, and is easy to apply to these questions:

'I need something to answer this... 0.10 sounds good, but let's check it first. 1+0.1 means the bat costs 1.10, and 1.10+0.10 = 1.2 - what a minute, that's not 1.10! I better try some other values - I guess this isn't so obvious after all!'

6 points

jhuffman

0 points

Right. I know how to get to a right answer but didn't understand Tordmor's expression.

0 points

1 points

Starting with

bat + ball = 1.10
bat = 1 + ball

substitute one into the other to eliminate it

1 + ball + ball = 1.10

simplify

1 + 2 ball = 1.10

then solve for ball

ball = (1.10 - 1)/2

then compute

ball = 0.05

This is literally how I would solve this problem. So you can see why I'm surprised people can answer it correctly on the fly.

1 points

scientism

2 points

The way it went in my head:

Huh, that's obvious, it's 1. Oh wait, 'more than.' So it's half the remaining .10.

(Although I would say it took less time than reading that sentence takes.)

It'd be interesting if getting the wrong answer first is the quickest method of getting the right answer.

2 points

lessdazed

1 points

It'd be interesting if getting the wrong answer first is the quickest method of getting the right answer.

I recently read something like this, though I can't remember where. The experiment went roughly like so:

Subjects were divided into two groups. In one, each subject was given 15 seconds to memorize an answer to a question for several seconds, and their performance recalling the answer later was recorded. In the other, each was asked to guess the answer, and was then given 7 or 8 or so seconds to memorize the correct answer. The time difference was to account for the time during which the second group's members thought about the question.

So each person was exposed to the question for 15 seconds, in the first group, they were exposed to the answer for those same 15 seconds, in the second group, for half that.

The second group was better at recalling the answers.

1 points

lessdazed

0 points

I found a set of five experiments similar to the one I described. Getting the wrong answer first appears to be a good method to get to the right answer.

Specifically, we evaluated the benefits of testing novel science instructional content before learning. Thus, the likelihood of failed tests was high, but we were able to extend our theory of testing to better understand whether trying and failing on test questions actually improved learners’ longer term retention of subsequently presented information...in the current study, the prequestions required participants to produce nouns or descriptive statements that they were unlikely to be able to answer on the basis of prior knowledge (e.g., “What is total colorblindness caused by brain damage called?”). This allowed us to isolate and examine the effects of unsuccessful retrieval attempts.

...

Previous research has demonstrated the memory benefits of successfully answering test questions. The five experiments reported herein provide evidence for the power of tests as learning events even when the tests are unsuccessful. Participants benefited from being tested before studying a passage—a pretesting effect—although they did not answer the test questions correctly on the initial test, as compared with being allowed additional study time. Furthermore, the benefits of pretests persisted after a 1-week delay.

...

The current research suggests that tests can be valuable learning events, even if learners cannot answer test questions correctly, as long as the tested material has educational value and is followed by instruction that provides answers to the tested questions.

0 points

jhuffman

1 points

I get it, thanks!

1 points

wedrifid

4 points

I know that yields the correct answer but how do I know I should divide the expression by two from the problem statement?

You could do a couple of steps forward in solving the equations but the intuitive explanation is something along the lines of: Assuming the ball costs nothing the total comes to $1. If the total is more than that then it means that both the ball and the bat have an increased price by an equal amount. So the difference from $0 of the ball is going to be half the difference between the total and $1.

4 points

3 points

In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012. Furthermore, the percentage of Americans that believe in biological evolution has only increased by four percentage points over the last twenty years. Such poll data begs the question: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view. Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. And then there’s the irony of evolution: our views about our own development don’t seem to be evolving.

This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts, shedding false beliefs the way a snake sheds its old skin.

To document the tension between new scientific concepts and our pre-scientific hunches, Shtulman invented a simple test. He asked a hundred and fifty college undergraduates who had taken multiple college-level science and math classes to read several hundred scientific statements. The students were asked to assess the truth of these statements as quickly as possible.

To make things interesting, Shtulman gave the students statements that were both intuitively and factually true—“The moon revolves around the Earth”—and statements whose scientific truth contradicts our intuitions (“The Earth revolves around the sun.”) As expected, it took students much longer to assess the veracity of true scientific statements that cut against our instincts. In every scientific category, from evolution to astronomy to thermodynamics, students paused before agreeing that the earth revolves around the sun, or that pressure produces heat, or that air is composed of matter. Although we know these things are true, we have to push back against our instincts, which leads to a measurable delay.

--"Why We Don’t Believe In Science", Lehrer, New Yorker

3 points

army1987

0 points

What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

So the beliefs of people in one country allow generalizations about “the human mind”.

You know, there aren't anywhere near that many anti-evolutionists outside the United States. (Unless you count people in the Third World who haven't heard of evolution in the first place.)

0 points

0 points

A quick check in Google for "worldwide creationism" suggests your faith is misguided.

0 points

wallowinmaya

3 points

I thought there is a negative correlation between Religiosity and IQ?

Importantly, researchers discovered the association between thinking styles and religious beliefs were not tied to the participants’ thinking ability or IQ.

3 points

Nornagest

6 points

Looks like this study was trying to focus on the former while filtering out the latter.

6 points

wallowinmaya

1 points

Ha, you're right. I had to convince myself with a concrete example because it's so counter-intuitive ( at least for me) .

1 points

magfrump

2 points

Presumably the study showed that the analytic thinking effect was independent of the IQ effect; i.e. holding the level of IQ constant, one still sees the connection between analytic versus intuitive thinking and religiosity, versus a correlation between IQ and analytic thinking causing the entire effect to be the same. (I haven't read the study this is just what I interpreted that quote to mean)

2 points

3 points

participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.

That's the coolest part to me. I mean, we all think that the more analytic tend to atheism (see the autism thing), but to show you can make people more atheistic just by asking them to remember an analytic experience...? That is neat.

3 points

MinibearRex

0 points

Do you know why your comment is in one line with a horizontal scrolling bar?

As a side note, can everyone see that, or is it just me? (I'm using Chrome)

0 points

Normal_Anomaly

0 points

It's normal for me (Firefox on Mac)

0 points

arundelo

0 points

It's wrapped like normal for me (Chrome on Linux).

0 points

0 points

Related to the pareidolia point: Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers, Riekki et al 2012

Illusory face perception, a tendency to find human-like faces where none are actually present in, for example, artifacts or scenery, is a common phenomenon that occasionally enters the public eye. We used two tests (N = 47) to analyze the relationship between paranormal and religious beliefs and illusory face perception. In a detection task, the participants detected face-like features from pictures of scenery and landscapes with and without face-like areas and, in a rating task, evaluated the face-likeness and emotionality of these areas. Believer groups were better at identifying the previously defined face-like regions in the images but were also prone to false alarms. Signal detection analysis revealed that believers had more liberal answering criteria than skeptics, but the actual detection sensitivity did not differ. The paranormal believers also evaluated the artifact faces as more face-like and emotional than the skeptics, and a similar trend was found between religious and non-religious people.

Ironically, Razib Khan criticizes it for finding too small an effect size: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/10/which-results-from-cognitive-psychology-are-robust-real/ (LW post; I disagree that we should expect a large effect size, see comments on Khan.)

0 points

0 points

Relevant is Luhrmann's 2012 When God Talks Back. I've made excerpts of what I thought were the most relevant parts for this topic: preface / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10

0 points

0 points

0 points

0 points

For example, one question stated: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The automatic or intuitive answer is 10 cents, but the correct answer is 5 cents

How is 5 correct?

0 points