ABSTRACT
What do we do when new information contradicts an existing belief we have about the world? For example, I hold the view that the coffee jar contains coffee. I see you look inside, and you announce that it contains tea bags. I am likely to believe you without checking the jar myself, because I assume that you are better informed about it than I am. I assume that you are right and I was wrong, and I can explain that by assuming that someone added tea bags to an empty coffee jar in my absence. To take a more complex example, suppose you are a 14-year-old who makes the reasonable assumption that physical objects such as tables are as solid as they appear to be. Her teacher gives a lesson on particle theory. Does the student believe what she is told? It may be difficult: “Well you can’t see any particles or owt, so it’s just—just can’t believe it. You know, that this table’s made out of particles—hundreds of millions …” (Driver, 1989, p. 103). A similar problem arises for younger children who are told that the earth is round, when their own experience tells them it is flat (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). Our naive theories about physics or biology are often contradicted by scientifically accepted theories (e.g., Atran, 1996; DiSessa, 1996). Similarly, a young child with a misconception about the conditions under which quantity can change (a nonconserver) may be contradicted by another nonconserver who is judging from a different perspective, or by a conserver (Doise, 1988; Roazzi & Bryant, 1998; Russell, 1981, 1982). The young child has the choice of rejecting the contradicting view or of trying to integrate it into his or her own interpretation. A final example is a child or adult who has experienced an event and is subsequently given a misleading suggestion about what occurred, as happens in research on suggestibility (as reviewed by Ceci & Bruck, 1993) or as may happen to a witness in court (Qin, Quas, Redlich, & Goodman, 1997), and this is discussed thoroughly in chapter 8, this volume. In each of these examples, the new input comes via an utterance (although this may be accompanied by a visual illustration or a practical demonstration) and it contradicts a belief based on one’s own direct experience—of coffee jars, tables, relative quantity, or the world in general. In some cases, as with the coffee jar example, the contradiction can be explained easily. In the case of “scientific knowledge,” which apparently contradicts our own experiences or naive theories, the contradictions may take more effort to resolve—it is not easy to simply discount one’s own direct experience of how things are, or one’s naive theory about how an aspect of the world works, but on the other hand it would be unreasonable to assume that the teacher is lying or grossly mistaken. If we are to maintain both beliefs, one solution might be to hold them in separate mental compartments, one for real life and the other for school science. Another solution might be to try to understand how a table can appear to be solid despite being made up of hundreds of millions of particles, or how the earth can appear to be flat despite really being round, or how quantity can remain unchanged despite a change in appearance. Of course these ways of resolving the apparent contradiction may be offered by a speaker who is aware that what he or she is saying contradicts the listener’s prior belief, but often listeners will be left to solve the problem themselves.
