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What is Counterintuitive? Religious Cognition and Natural Expectation

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Abstract

What is ‘counterintuitive’? There is general agreement that it refers to a violation of previously held knowledge, but the precise definition seems to vary with every author and study. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the notion of ‘counterintuitive’ and provide a more philosophically rigorous definition congruent with the history of psychology, recent experimental work in ‘minimally counterintuitive’ concepts, the science vs. religion debate, and the developmental and evolutionary background of human beings. We conclude that previous definitions of counterintuitiveness have been flawed and did not resolve the conflict between a believer’s conception of the supernatural entity (an atypical “real kind”) and the non-believer’s conception (empty name/fictional). Furthermore, too much emphasis has been placed on the universality and (presumed) innateness of intuitive concepts (and hence the criteria for what is counterintuitive)—and far too little attention paid to learning and expertise. We argue that many putatively universal concepts are not innate, but mostly learned and defeasible—part of a religious believer’s repertoire of expert knowledge. Nonetheless, the results from empirical studies about the memorability of counterintuitive concepts have been convincing and it is difficult to improve on existing designs and methodologies. However, future studies in counterintuitive concepts need to embed their work in research about context effects, typicality, the psychology of learning and expertise (for example, the formation of expert templates and range defaults), with more attention to the sources of knowledge (direct and indirect knowledge) and a better idea of what ‘default’ knowledge really is.

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Acknowledgments

(YIR): I thank my colleagues in the Explaining Religion (EXREL) project, especially Harvey Whitehouse for organising the whole project, the other research fellows, PhD students, other project partners, and administrative staff. Thank you to Justin Barrett for enthusiastically disagreeing with me in a seminar. I also thank Afzal Upal, Nicolas Baumard, Jennifer Dolinsky, and Harvey Whitehouse for comments on a much earlier and shorter draft, and to Dirk Semmann for allowing me time to work on this manuscript in Germany. Y.I.R. was partly funded by the German Initiative of Excellence of the German Science Foundation (DFG) and by the EC-FP6 EXREL project grant 43225.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Yvan I. Russell

  2. Department of Psychology, Middlesex University, London, UK

    Yvan I. Russell

  3. Junior Research Group “Evolution of Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior”, Courant Research Centre “Evolution of Social Behaviour”, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Yvan I. Russell

  4. Department of Psychology, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK

    Yvan I. Russell & Fernand Gobet

  5. Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Fernand Gobet

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  1. Yvan I. Russell
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  2. Fernand Gobet
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Correspondence to Yvan I. Russell.

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Yvan Russell was partly funded by the German Initiative of Excellence of the German Science Foundation (DFG) and by the EC-FP6 EXREL project grant 43225.

Yvan Russell wrote this manuscript as part of the Explaining Religion (EXREL) Project and the British Academy Centenary Research Project.

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Russell, Y.I., Gobet, F. What is Counterintuitive? Religious Cognition and Natural Expectation. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 715–749 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0160-5

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