Minimal counterintuitiveness effect

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Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) i.e., concepts that violate a few ontological expectations of a category such as the category of an agent, are more memorable than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive (MXCI) concepts. [1] A number of experimental psychology studies have found support for Boyer's hypothesis. Upal [2] labelled this as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.

Boyer originally did not precisely specify the number of expectation-violations that would render an idea maximally counterintuitive. Early empirical studies including those by Boyer himself [3] and others [4] did not study MXCI concepts. Both these studies only used concepts violating a single expectation (which were labelled as MCI concepts). Atran [5] was the first to study memory for MXCI concepts and labeled concepts violating 2-expectations as maximally counterintuitive. Studies by the I-75 Cognition and Culture Group [6] [7] [8] [9] also labelled ideas violating two expectations as maximally counterintuitive. Barrett [10] argued that ideas violating 1 or 2 ontological expectations should be considered MCI and only ideas violating 3 or more expectations should be labelled MXCI. Subsequent studies [11] of the MCI effect have followed this revised labelling scheme.

Upal [12] has divided the cognitive accounts that explain the MCI effect into two categories: the context-based model of minimal counterintuitiveness, and content-based view of minimal counterintuitiveness. The context-based view emphasizes the role played by context in making an idea counterintuitive whereas the content-based view ignores the role of context.

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The context-based model of the counterintuitiveness effect is a cognitive model of The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect i.e., the finding by many cognitive scientists of religion that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable for people than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts

Postdictable concepts are those concepts that can be justified after having been seen. Upal labeled a counterintuitive concept as postdictable if the postdiction process is successful making sense of the concept i.e., the reader is successfully able to construct a justification given the reader's background knowledge, level of motivation and interest, and the cognitive resources available to the reader. According to the context-based model of minimal counterintuiveness, postdictable counterintuitive concepts are minimally counterintuitive and are remembered well. Those counterintuitive concepts that are not postdictable in a given context are considered to be maximally counterintuitive and are not remembered well by people. Thus the concept of a flying elephant is postdictable when set up in the context of Operation Dumbo Drop because it can be justified in that context. The concept of a "square triangle that only exists on Wednesdays and eats cats" however does not make any sense and is therefore not postdictable.

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References

  1. ↑ Boyer, Pascal. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas University of California Press, 1994.
  2. ↑ Upal, M. A. (2010). "An Alternative View of the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect", Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 11(2), 194-203.
  3. ↑ Boyer, P., & Ramble, C. (2001). "Cognitive templates for religious concepts". Cognitive Science, 25, 535–564.
  4. ↑ Barrett, J. L., & Nyhof, M. (2001). "Spreading non-natural concepts: the role of intuitive conceptual structures in memory and transmission of cultural materials". Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1, 69–100.
  5. ↑ Atran, S. (2002). "In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion", Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press.
  6. ↑ Upal, M. A. (2005). "Role of context in memorability of intuitive and counterintuitive concepts". In B. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th annual conference of the cognitive science society, (pp. 2224–2229). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.
  7. ↑ Gonce, L., Upal, M., Slone, J., & Tweney, R. (2006). "The role of context in the recall of counterintuitive concepts". Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6(3–4), 521–547.
  8. ↑ Tweney, R. D., Upal, M. A., Gonce, L., Slone, D. J., & Edwards, K. (2006). "The creative structuring of counterintuitive worlds". Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 483–498.
  9. ↑ Upal, M. A., Gonce, L., Tweney, R., et al. (2007). Contextualizing counterintuitiveness: How context affects comprehension and memorability of counterintuitive concepts. Cognitive Science, 31(3), 415–439.
  10. ↑ Barrett, J. L. (2008). "Coding and quantifying counterintuitiveness in religious concepts: Theoretical and methodological reflections". Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 20, 308–338.
  11. ↑ Harmon-Vukic, M., Upal, M. A., & Trainor, C. "Understanding the role of context in memory for maximally counterintuitive concepts", in Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
  12. ↑ Upal, M. A. (2010). "An Alternative View of the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect", Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 11(2), 194-203.
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