The Human Function Compunction: Teleological explanation in adults

“For example, from preschool, children attribute functions to entities like lions, mountains, and icebergs, viewing them as ‘‘made for something” (Kelemen, 1999a).”

“It therefore reappears easily even in those with some basic scientific training; for example, in descriptions of ecological balance (“fungi grow in forests to help decomposition”) or species survival (“finches diversified in order to survive”; Kelemen and Rosset 2009).”

“…evidence for the persistence of early intuitions is limited to studies that tap a single conceptual distinction, like the distinction between living and nonliving things (Zaitchik & Solomon, 2008) or the distinction between teleological and nonteleological processes (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“Research by Kelemen and colleagues (e.g., Kelemen, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2004) suggests that children display a broad incli- nation to view objects and behaviors of all kinds—including features of the natural world—as existing for a purpose.”

“E-mail address: lombrozo@berkeley.edu Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognitive Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/cogpsych sharp because it was honed”), and also by appeal to the knife’s function (‘‘it is sharp because it’s for cutting”).”

“…latter is that children tend to engage in “promiscuous teleology” (reporting that clouds are made for raining, or lions are made for going in a zoo), and adults tend to fall back on teleological explanations when placed under timing constraints and forced to answer quickly (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“…such explanations “promiscuously,” as do adults who have not been exposed to alternative scientific explanations (Casler & Kelemen, 2008), who are required to respond under speeded conditions (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009), or who suffer from Alzheimer's disease (Lombrozo, Kelemen, & Zaitchik, 2007).”

“Biases or tendencies of the human mind that support religiosity include misattributions of intent to naturally occurring events (Kelemen, 2004; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009) and belief in disembodied mind as an attribute of supernatural deities (Bering, 2006; Bloom, 2007; Norenzayan, Gervais, &…”

“These intuitions tend to translate in religious beliefs, but they can also contribute to a quasi-religious view on nature [30,31].”

“…& Schulz, 2008); (2) teleological biases, the tendency to treat features and actions of category members as existing for some purpose (Kelemen, 2003; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Opfer, 2002; Opfer & Gelman, 2001); and (3) intentionality biases, the tendency to assume that events are directed…”

“College students were more selective; they rejected teleological explanations for nonliving objects, but 67–81% of them still preferred teleological explanations for biological properties (see also Kelemen and Rossett, 2009).”

“Several studies have also shown that when skeptics are required to reason under time-pressure, they tend to show similar teleological and intuitive reasoning biases as typically observed in supernatural believers (Kelemen and Rosset, 2009; Svedholm and Lindeman, 2013; Kelemen et al., 2013).”

“Similarly, Kelemen and Rossett (2009) have shown that higher levels of teleological thinking are associated with poorer performance on the Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection (Anderson et al., 2002).”

“This predisposition to view nonhuman acts as intentional persists into adulthood (Casler & Kelemen, 2008; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Lombrozo, Kelemen, & Zaitchik, 2007).”

“For example, Kelemen (2004; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009) characterized children’s tendency for “promiscuous” teleological reasoning in a similar way as Piaget described artificialism, that is, as an intuitive tendency to explain all kinds of natural phenomena by reference to a human-like purpose, such…”

“Furthermore, unwarranted intentional explanations and animistic attributions of life to artefacts have been shown to be more common among individuals with weaker inhibitory control (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Lombrozo, Kelemen, & Zaitchik, 2007; Zaitchik & Solomon, 2008).”

“Moreover, adults often readily attribute anthropomorphic intentions to nonhuman animals, or inanimate objects and entities [41,52,53].”

“Promiscuous teleology persists into adulthood (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009) and may predispose people to become intuitive theists, very likely to infer the presence of a mindful agent behind all the apparent purpose in the world.”

“…biases, first interpretations, and intuitive reasoning often relies on results from tasks Science Education completed under speeded conditions (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Rosset, 2008); it is expected that time limits will impair or constrain the action of control and monitoring mechanisms…”

“…and intuitive reasoning often relies on results from tasks completed under speeded conditions (Gillard, Van Dooren, Schaeken, & Verschaffel, 2009b; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Rosset, 2008); it is expected that time limits will impair or constrain the action of control and monitoring mechanisms…”

“The biases themselves remain, which is apparent when adults are put under cognitive load (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009), or start to lose some mental abilities in cases of Alzheimer’s (Lombrozo, Kelemen, & Zaitchik, 2007), but we are remarkably capable of fluently processing information that is counter…”

“…Mellet, Moutier, Pineau, Mazoyer et al. (2000); Dunbar, Fugelsang & Stein (2007); Rossi, Lubin, Lanoë & Pineau (2012); Lubin, Lanoë, Pineau & Rossi (2012); Potvin, Turmel & Masson (2014); Masson, Potvin, Riopel & Brault-Foisy (2014); Kelemen & Rosset (2009) and Kelemen, Rottman & Seston (2012).”

“…to a bias to reason about the natural world teleologically, and that this explanatory bias does not disappear because of advanced education as much as it is overridden by explicitly learned scientific knowledge (see also Kelemen et al., 2005; Kelemen & DiYanni, 2005; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“For instance, following dual-process accounts of religion, a stronger reliance on intuitive thinking should make people more likely to accept agency-intuitions (for related work in this direction, see, for example, research on teleological thinking; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“Indeed, the most tenacious misconception in biology may be the idea that all processes serve a purpose (Gregory, 2009; Kelemen and Rosset, 2009; Mead and Scott, 2010).”

“Many people appear to have conceptions of this kind (Kelemen and Rosset 2009).”

“…nontimed counterparts to endorse scientifically inaccurate teleological statements about living and nonliving natural phenomena, some of which are directly relevant to evolution (e.g., “the fittest animals survive so that species can grow stronger”; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Rottman et al., 2017).”

“…or related groups, and “memes” that spread religious ideas like viral infections even if religious devotion is maladaptive to a given individual or group (Bloom, 2007; Boyer, 2008; Dawkins, 2006; Dennett, 2006; Fincher and Thornhill, 2008; Inzlicht et al., 2009; Kelemen and Rosset, 2009).”

“…agents may modulate the detection of faces fits well with Guthrie ’ s proposal that belief in supernatural agents is related to pareidolia-like perceptual biases (Guthrie, 1980, 1993), rather than the attribution of intentions to physical objects (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Kelemen et al., 2013).”

“…everyday uses of ‘fatalism’ seem to express the idea that there is an underlying teleology to the way in which some events unfold, and we wondered whether there was anything more to the folk notion of fatalism than what some psychologists call “promiscuous teleology” (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“One major advance in our understanding of student learning is that learners do not progress directly from novice to expert levels; rather, the pathways of knowledge growth in biology (and other domains) are highly inefficient and involve integrating scientific ideas into naı̈ve knowledge frameworks, generating heterog…”

“Understanding the evolution of each of these explanatory stances with development and learning is of central interest in cognitive and developmental psychology, as well as in science education (Griffin & Baron‐Cohen, 2002 ; Grotzer, 2003 ; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009 ; Lombrozo & Carey, 2006 ).”

“However, Kelemen and Rosset (2009) found that undergraduates endorse more scientifically spurious teleological explanations for natural phenomena (e.g., ‘‘the sun makes light so that plants can photosynthesize’’) when under time pressure than when allowed to respond at their own pace.”

“Moreover, the creative power of blind selection also conflicts with our teleological intuitions about functional complexity and our intuitive design stance (De Cruz & De Smedt, 2010; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Reiss, 2009).”

“There is a range of human cognitive biases that are thought to make children and adults “intuitive theists” (Järnefelt, Canfield, & Kelemen, 2015; Kelemen, 2004; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“…college years may underlie systems of biological misconceptions, namely inaccurate biological reasoning that may cross disparate topic areas such as physiology, evolution, and molecular biology, yet have in common threads of teleological reasoning (Coley & Tanner, 2015; Kelemen & Rossett, 2009).”

“…of formal instruction since, consistent with dual processing or conceptual coexistence accounts (e.g., Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Kahneman, 2011; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012; see also Legare, Evans, Rosengren, & Harris, 2012), even highly educated adults such as…”

“In contrast, when teleological explanations are used to explain the properties of natural objects, they are often explicitly judged as incorrect by adults and viewed as scientifically unwarranted (Kelemen, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2003; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“28 of a fork is to help in eating), but research suggests people apply teleology more broadly (Kelemen, 1999; Kelemen and Rosset, 2009).”

“Adults with poor inhibitory control in timeconstrained contexts tend to broadly explain living and nonliving natural phenomena by reference to a purpose (Kelemen and Rosset, 2009).”

“First, unlike other highly secular countries like Denmark and Sweden (Zuckerman, 2008), which share Greek and Abrahamic philosophical traditions with the other Western societies in which the teleological bias has previously been uncovered, China has an intellectual inheritance that is primarily rooted in Confucianism,…”

“…coherent to effectively challenge them, children’s untaught intuitions can become long-term obstacles to elaborating a scientifically accurate understanding of adaptation (see Järnefelt, Canfield, & Kelemen, 2015, and Kelemen & Rosset, 2009, for more on this dual processing perspective).”

“Several studies suggest that even selfprofessed atheists harbor implicit forms of supernatural cognition (Bering, 2006; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009).”

“This argument is represented most strongly by Kelemen’s “promiscuous teleology” hypotheses (Kelemen, 1999b; Kelemen and Rosset, 2009).”

“, ‘The sun radiates heat to nurture life on earth’ [Kelemen and Rosset 2009].”

“A productive trend in BER involves efforts to link cognitive perspectives developed in other fields (e.g., education, psychology) with discipline-specific challenges characteristic of teaching and learning about living systems (Inagaki and Hatano, 1991; Kelemen and Rosset 2009).”

“…urban 11-to 12-year-olds (33% of rural 11-to 12-year-olds) continued to reason that at least one of their capacities functioned during prelife (see Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Kelemen et al., 2012; Legare, Evans, Rosengren, & Harris, 2012; Legare & Gelman, 2008; Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012, for…”

“…manifests itself as differences in how quickly and how accurately people verify scientific ideas that are consistent with folk explanations relative to those that are inconsistent with them (Goldberg & Thompson-Schill, 2009; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Potvin & Cyr, 2017; Shtulman & Val-carcel, 2012).”

“…and supernatural beliefs agrees with previous findings obtained in studies on anthropomorphism (Purzycki et al., 2012; Shtulman, 2008), promiscuous teleology (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Kelemen et al., 2013), and core ontological confusions (Barber, 2014; Lindeman et al., 2015; Lobato et al., 2014).”

“For instance, Malt (1994) finds that people say that tea is 91% H2O but not water and that pool water is 81.”

“This default perspective on reality is not entirely displaced with a more mature, scientifically informed perspective on the world but rather is masked in adulthood (e.g., Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Kelemen, Rottman & Seston, 2013; Lombrozo, Kelemen & Zaitchik, 2007).”

“Kelemen and Rossett demonstrated that teleological thinking persists in adults, who continue to invoke causal explanations for what they observe in the natural world (19).”

“Adults and professional scientists may maintain intuitive reasoning frameworks, and while scientific education can allow accurate explanations to outweigh intuitive ones, intuitive reasoning itself is deeply rooted and persistent (Kelemen and Rosset, 2009; Shtulman and Valcarcel, 2012; Shtulman and Harrington, 2015).”

“Researchers have documented the persistence of naive ideas, while new, accurate scientific concepts are added to naive “knowledge” frameworks (Vosniadou et al. 2008; Kelemen and Rosset 2009; Nehm 2010).”

“Similarly, in speeded judgment tasks, where schooled adults have to choose very quickly between teleological and non-teleological explanations, they too show an increased tendency to reason teleologically (Kelemen and Rosset 2009).”