Education 2.0 & 3.0

Have you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too.

Have you ever seen a person crouching in a dark alley and mistaken it for a garbage bag? Me neither. Why does the error go one way and not the other?
Human beings are intensely social animals. We live in hierarchical social environments in which our comfort, reproduction, and very survival depend on our relationships with other people. As a result, we are very good at thinking about things in social ways. In fact, some scientists have argued that the evolutionary arms race for strategic social thinking—either for competition, for cooperation, or both—was a large part of why we became so intelligent as a species.This affinity for social reasoning, however, has resulted in systematic quirks in human reasoning about the non-human. This happens in two ways. First, we tend to see humanlike agency where there isn’t any, a common form of pareidolia. Many people view the sun as happy, for instance, and in religions the world over, diseases are seen as curses cast by witches. This effect has been argued to be one of the main reasons religions exist at all: People imagine that there must be supernatural beings behind the scenes, making the world work the way it does.1 Second, we are more prone to believe in explanations when they are couched in terms of the everyday psychology people use to explain and predict people’s behavior. Teachers sometimes take advantage of this, using “anthropomorphic” glosses on natural phenomena to help their students learn (e.g., “the water wants to find its level.”)

Via Wildcat2030, Miloš Bajčetić