Andrew Shtulman

Andrew Shtulman
Occidental College · Department of Psychology

Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Occidental College

About

98
Publications
44,683
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3,006
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August 2007 - June 2020
Occidental College
Position
  • Professor (Full)

Publications

Publications (98)
Article
Full-text available
In nature, competition within and between species is the norm, yet nature is also reputed to be a “peaceable kingdom” where animals cooperate rather than compete. This study explored how such contrasting views of nature influence students’ biological reasoning. College undergraduates (n = 165) assessed the prevalence of cooperative behaviors, such...
Article
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Introduction Cognitive reflection is the ability and disposition to reflect on one's own thinking, allowing a person to identify and correct judgments grounded in intuition rather than logic. Cognitive reflection strongly predicts school-aged children's understanding of counterintuitive science concepts. Here, we asked whether children's cognitive...
Article
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Hundreds of studies have explored student evolution acceptance because evolution is a core concept of biology that many undergraduate biology students struggle to accept. However, this construct of “evolution acceptance” has been defined and measured in various ways, which has led to inconsistencies across studies and difficulties in comparing resu...
Article
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Young children tend to deny the possibility of events that violate their expectations, including events that are merely improbable, like making onion-flavored ice cream or owning a crocodile as a pet. Could this tendency be countered by teaching children more valid strategies for judging possibility? We explored this question by training children a...
Article
Children can be unduly skeptical of events that violate their expectations, claiming that these events neither could happen nor should happen even if the events violate no physical or social laws. Here, we explored whether children's reasoning about possibility and permissibility-modal cognition-is aided by cognitive reflection, or the disposition...
Article
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Importance: Live feedback in the operating room is essential in surgical training. Despite the role this feedback plays in developing surgical skills, an accepted methodology to characterize the salient features of feedback has not been defined. Objective: To quantify the intraoperative feedback provided to trainees during live surgical cases an...
Article
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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's belief...
Article
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Background There is no standard for the feedback that an attending surgeon provides to a training surgeon, which may lead to variable outcomes in teaching cases. Objective To create and administer standardized feedback to medical students in an attempt to improve performance and learning. Design, setting, and participants A cohort of 45 medical s...
Article
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What do cows drink? The correct answer is water, but many are tempted to say milk. The disposition to override an intuitive response (milk) with a more analytic response (water) is known as cognitive reflection. Tests of cognitive reflection predict a wide range of skills and abilities in adults. In this article, we discuss the construction of a de...
Article
Imaginary worlds may satisfy our need to explore, but it's an open question what we are searching for. Research on imagination suggests that if we are searching for something extraordinary – something that violates our intuitions about real-world causality – then we seek it in small doses and in contexts that ultimately confirm our intuitions. Imag...
Chapter
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Beliefs play a central role in our lives. They lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our culture, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Given their central importance, researchers across a number of disciplines have studied beliefs, leading to results a...
Conference Paper
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Fake news has permeated online media, presenting consumers with the challenge of detecting it. At what age are we capable of undertaking this challenge? And what factors predict success? We explored these questions with elementary-school-aged children (n = 86), who were asked to judge the veracity of ten news stories, five fake and five real. Child...
Preprint
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children’s theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We explored these questions in the context of children’s bel...
Article
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Research at the intersection of cognitive science and religion can illuminate the cognitive underpinnings of religious thought and behavior, as White (2021) persuasively demonstrates in her comprehensive synthesis of CSR research, but this research can also constrain broader theories of cognition. Here, I examine CSR research relevant to a prominen...
Article
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Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from all-powerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptualize persons, intuitively representing their minds as separable from their bodies. Infants have both a folk ps...
Article
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Collaboration can be an effective means of learning, but is it effective in domains where collaborators rely on conceptually distinct forms of reasoning? We explored this question in the domain of evolution, where many students construe evolution as the uniform transformation of all members of a population rather than the selective survival and rep...
Article
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The biological world includes many negatively valenced activities, like predation, parasitism, and disease. Do children's books cover these activities? And how do parents discuss them with their children? In a content analysis of children's nature books (Study 1), we found that negatively valenced concepts were rarely depicted across genres and rea...
Article
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Cognitive reflection is the tendency to override an intuitive response so as to engage in the reflection necessary to derive a correct response. Here, we examine the emergence of cognitive reflection in a culture that values nonanalytic thinking styles, Chinese culture. We administered a child‐friendly version of the cognitive reflection test, the...
Article
In scientific and popular literature, piloerection (e.g. goosebumps) is often claimed to accompany the experience of awe, though this correlation has not been tested empirically. Using two pre-registered and independently collected samples (N = 210), we examined the objective physiological occurrence of piloerection in response to awe-inducing stim...
Article
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Young children are adept at several types of scientific reasoning, yet older children and adults have difficulty mastering formal scientific ideas and practices. Why do “little scientists” often become scientifically illiterate adults? We address this question by examining the role of intuition in learning science, both as a body of knowledge and a...
Article
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Learning science requires contending with intuitions that are incompatible with scientific principles, such as the intuition that animals are alive but plants are not or the intuition that solids are composed of matter but gases are not. Here, we explore the tension between science and intuition in elementary school–aged children and whether that t...
Article
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Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition, impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some violations as "more impossible" than others (Shtulman & Morgan, 2017). When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells, American adults are influenced by causal considerations that should be irrelevant given the spell's primary c...
Article
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The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is a widely used measure of adults’ propensity to engage in reflective analytic thought. The CRT is strongly predictive of many diverse psychological factors, but unsuitable for use with developmental samples. Here, we examine a children’s cognitive reflection test, the CRT-D, and investigate its...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition, impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some violations as "more impossible" than others (Shtulman & Morgan, 2017). When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells, American adults are influenced by seemingly irrelevant considerations, judging, for instance, that it would b...
Preprint
Studies indicate that Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs, are safe to consume, but many adults remain skeptical. What kind of input are children receiving about GMOs? And how does that input shape their understanding of what GMOs are? We investigated this question in the context of parent-child conversations about food product decisions. Seven...
Article
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People who hold scientific explanations for natural phenomena also hold folk explanations, and the two types of explanations compete under some circumstances. Here, we explore the question of why folk explanations persist in the face of a well‐understood scientific alternative, a phenomenon known as explanatory coexistence. We consider two accounts...
Article
Belief in supernatural beings is widespread across cultures, but the properties of those beings vary from one culture to another. The supernatural beings that are part of Hinduism, for instance, are represented as human-like, whereas those that are part of Islam are represented more abstractly. Here, we explore how children exposed to both types of...
Preprint
Belief in supernatural beings is widespread across cultures, but the properties of those beings vary from one culture to another. The supernatural beings that are part of Hinduism, for instance, are represented as human-like, whereas those that are part of Islam are represented more abstractly. Here, we explore how children exposed to both types of...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Adults with extensive science education exhibit cognitive conflict when reasoning about counterintuitive scientific ideas, such as whether clouds have weight or whether bacteria need nutrients. Here, we investigated whether elementary-school-aged children show the same conflict and whether that conflict can be reduced by targeted instruction. Seven...
Preprint
Disembodied beings are prevalent in present and past religions, from disembodied gods to invisible spirits to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence in terms of a quirk in how we initially conceptualize intentional agents, representing their minds as functionally independent of their bodies. Infants are claimed to have both a...
Preprint
Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5–7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about ordi...
Article
Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual’s level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life. Here, we discuss the main factors associated with acceptance of evolution and chart a path forward for evolution ed...
Article
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Representations of God in art, literature, and discourse range from the highly anthropomorphic to the highly abstract. The present study explored whether people who endorse anthropomorphic God concepts hold different religious beliefs and engage in different religious practices than those who endorse abstract concepts. Adults of various religious a...
Data
Responses to questions about angels by theists and atheists, plus correlations between responses and anthropomorphization of God. (PDF)
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Responses to questions about religious practices, affiliation, and development by theists and atheists, plus correlations between responses and anthropomorphization of God. (PDF)
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Responses to questions about God by theists and atheists, plus correlations between responses and anthropomorphization of God. (PDF)
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Responses to questions about Heaven and Hell by theists and atheists, plus correlations between responses and anthropomorphization of God. (PDF)
Data
Responses to questions about cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis by theists and atheists, plus correlations between responses and anthropomorphization of God. (PDF)
Data
Responses to questions about Satan by theists and atheists, plus correlations between responses and anthropomorphization of God. (PDF)
Data
Responses to questions about suffering and misdeeds by theists and atheists, plus correlations between responses and anthropomorphization of God. (PDF)
Data
Correlations among psychological, biological, and physical properties attributions to God, angels, and Satan. (PDF)
Article
Full-text available
Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5–7 ( N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about ord...
Article
Full-text available
Developmental psychologists are increasingly writing articles, columns, books, and blogs for the general public, but this type of writing can be challenging. Here, I provide guidance on how to communicate scientific ideas to nonscientists, touching on what content to cover, how to organize that content, what language to use, and what tone to adopt....
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Scientific ideas can be difficult to affirm if they contradict earlier-developed intuitive theories. Here, we investigated how instruction on counterintuitive scientific ideas affects the accessibility of those ideas under time pressure. Participants (138 college undergraduates) verified, as quickly as possible, statements about life and matter bef...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The cognitive reflection test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) assesses how well adults can reflect on the validity of their own thinking, and it has been shown to predict several measures of normative reasoning. Here, we sought to create a version of the cognitive reflection test suitable for elementary-school-aged children, which could be used to study the...
Article
Full-text available
The theory of evolution by natural selection has begun to revolutionize our understanding of perception, cognition, language, social behavior, and cultural practices. Despite the centrality of evolutionary theory to the social sciences, many students, teachers, and even scientists struggle to understand how natural selection works. Our goal is to p...
Preprint
Full-text available
The theory of evolution by natural selection has begun to revolutionize our understanding of perception, cognition, language, social behavior, and cultural practices. Despite the centrality of evolutionary theory to the social sciences, many students, teachers, and even scientists struggle to understand how natural selection works. Our goal is to p...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Collaboration is generally an effective means of learning new information, but is collaboration productive in domains where collaborators may hold qualitatively different conceptions of the domain's causal structure? We explored this question in the domain of evolutionary biology, where previous research has shown that most individuals construe evo...
Article
Full-text available
Scientists from Einstein to Sagan have linked emotions like awe with the motivation for scientific inquiry, but no research has tested this possibility. Theoretical and empirical work from affective science, however, suggests that awe might be unique in motivating explanation and exploration of the physical world. We synthesize theories of awe with...
Article
Young children have difficulty distinguishing events that violate physical laws (impossible events) from those that violate mere physical regularities (improbable events). They judge both to be “impossible” (e.g., Shtulman & Carey, 2007). They also have difficulty distinguishing events that violate moral laws (immoral events) from events that viola...
Book
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[http://hyperurl.co/scienceblind] Why do we catch colds? What causes seasons to change? And if you fire a bullet from a gun and drop one from your hand, which bullet hits the ground first? In a pinch we almost always get these questions wrong. Worse, we regularly misconstrue fundamental qualities of the world around us. In Scienceblind, cognitive a...
Article
Full-text available
A common intuition, often captured in fiction, is that some impossible events (e.g., levitating a stone) are “more impossible” than others (e.g., levitating a feather). We investigated the source of this intuition, hypothesizing that graded notions of impossibility arise from explanatory considerations logically precluded by the violation at hand b...
Chapter
Full-text available
Humans use natural and supernatural explanations for phenomena such as illness, death, and human origins. These explanations are available not just to different individuals within a society, but to the same individual, coexisting within a single mind. This chapter proposes that understanding the coexistence of qualitatively different explanations i...
Article
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The scientific knowledge needed to engage with policy issues like climate change, vaccination, and stem cell research often conflicts with our intuitive theories of the world. How resilient are our intuitive theories in the face of contradictory scientific knowledge? Here, we present evidence that intuitive theories in 10 domains of knowledge-astro...
Article
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Research Findings: Evolution by natural selection is often relegated to the high school curriculum on the assumption that younger students cannot grasp its complexity. We sought to test that assumption by teaching children ages 4–12 (n = 96) a selection-based explanation for biological adaptation and comparing their success to that of adults (n = 3...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A common intuition, often captured in fiction, is that some impossible events (e.g., levitating a stone) are " more impossible " than others (e.g., levitating a feather). We investigated the source of this intuition, hypothesizing that graded notions of impossibility arise from explanatory considerations logically precluded by the violation at hand...
Article
Full-text available
Scientific cognition is a hard-won achievement, both from a historical point of view and a developmental point of view. Here, I review seven facets of lay cognition that run counter to, and often impede, scientific cognition: incompatible folk theories, missing ontologies, tolerance for shallow explanations, tolerance for contradictory explanations...
Article
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Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human properties to nonhuman entities, is often posited as an explanation for the origin and nature of God concepts, but it remains unclear which human properties we tend to attribute to God and under what conditions. In three studies, participants decided whether two types of human properties-psychological (...
Article
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Understanding scientific theories like evolution by natural selection, classical mechanics, or plate tectonics requires knowledge restructuring at the level of individual concepts, or conceptual change. Here, we investigate the role of cognitive reflection (Frederick, 2005) in achieving conceptual change. College undergraduates (n = 184) were admin...
Article
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Scientific discoveries come in two forms: those that can be understood in terms of a preexist-ing paradigm and those that require the adoption of a new paradigm altogether. Consider the difference between the discovery of Neptune and the discovery of heliocentrism. Neptune was predicted to exist many decades before it was discovered, on account of...
Article
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Anthropomorphism is a default strategy for making the unfamiliar familiar, but is it a uniform strategy? Do all dimensions of anthropomorphism " hang together " ? We explored this question by involving adults (n = 99) in a speeded property-attribution task in which they decided, as quickly as possible, whether properties of two types— psychological...
Article
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A central question in the study of moral psychology is how immediate intuition interacts with more thoughtful deliberation in the generation of moral judgments. The present study sheds additional light on this question by comparing adults' judgments of moral permissibility with their judgments of physical possibility-a form of judgment that also in...
Article
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Recent research suggests that a major obstacle to evolution understanding is an essentialist view of the biological world. The present study investigated the effects of formal biology instruction on such misconceptions. Participants (N = 291) completed an assessment of their understanding of six aspects of evolution (variation, inheritance, adaptat...
Article
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The evidential support for scientific claims is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to that for supernatural claims, yet students may not appreciate this difference in light of the fact that both types of claims are learned in similar ways (through testimony rather than firsthand observation) and perform similar functions (explaining observed...
Article
Full-text available
The theory of evolution by natural selection has revolutionized the biological sciences yet remains confusing and controversial to the public at large. This study explored how a particular segment of the public – visitors to a natural history museum – reason about evolution in the context of an interactive cladogram, or evolutionary tree. The parti...
Chapter
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Evolution by natural selection is a theory that has revolutionized the biological sciences yet has remained largely misunderstood by the public. We present an analysis of how evolution understanding is constrained by early developing essentialist biases and test that analysis with a teaching intervention targeted specifically at those biases and th...
Article
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In 2005, the parents of nine students attending Dover High School in Dover, Pennsylvania, sued the Dover Area School District over their decision to require high school biology teachers to read a statement alerting their students to the existence of " gaps " in the theory of evolution and encouraging them " to keep an open mind " regarding alternat...
Article
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The ability to differentiate possible events from impossible ones is an invaluable skill when reasoning about claims that transcend the perceptual evidence at hand, yet preschool-aged children do not readily make this differentiation when reasoning about physically extraordinary events [Shtulman, A., & Carey, S. (2007). Improbable or impossible? Ho...
Article
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Why is conceptual change difficult yet possible? Ohlsson (2009/this issue) proposes that the answer can be found in the dynamics of resubsumption, or the process by which a domain of experience is resubsumed under an intuitive theory originally constructed to explain some other domain of experience. Here, it is argued that conceptual change is diff...
Article
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The cognitive study of religion has been highly influenced by P. Boyer's (2001, 2003) claim that supernatural beings are conceptualized as persons with counterintuitive properties. The present study tests the generality of this claim by exploring how different supernatural beings are conceptualized by the same individual and how different individua...
Article
Full-text available
Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection. The present study investigated whether such beliefs are impediments to learning this concept as well. Participants (43 children aged 4-9 and 34 adults) were asked to judge the variability of various behavioral and ana...
Article
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The relationship between understanding an idea and accepting it as true has been little studied, yet this relationship is key to science education. The present study explored this relationship in the context of evolution by natural selection, which just 40% of Americans accept as true. US undergraduates' understanding of evolution was assessed befo...
Article
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Byrne's criteria for considering imagination rational do not accord with standard notions of rationality. A different criterion – that is, the correspondence between an inference strategy and its domain of application – is offered and illustrated with recent work on possibility judgment. This analysis suggests that, although imagination can be put...
Article
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The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, child...
Article
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Philosophers of biology have long argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was qualitatively different from all earlier theories of evolution. Whereas Darwin's predecessors and contemporaries explained adaptation as the transformation of a species' "essence," Darwin explained adaptation as the selective propagation of randomly occurring mutations w...
Article
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Guidelines for submitting commentsPolicy: Comments that contribute to the discussion of the article will be posted within approximately three business days. We do not accept anonymous comments. Please include your email address; the address will not be displayed in the posted comment. Cell Press Editors will screen the comments to ensure that they...
Article
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Scientific entities like X-rays and black holes defy firsthand observation and everyday intuition, yet most people outside the scientific community still believe in their existence. Upon what kind of epistemic foundations do such beliefs rest? The present study explored this question by comparing students' scientific beliefs to their supernatural b...
Article
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Public representations of God range from the highly anthropomorphic to the highly abstract, and the present study explored whether differences in the interpretation of those representations are correlated with differences in one's religious beliefs and religious practices more generally. American adults of varying ages and religious backgrounds com...
Article
Full-text available
When individuals replace their naïve theories of natural phenomena with more accurate, scientific ones, what happens to the original theories? Are they overwritten or merely suppressed? We investigated this issue by asking college undergraduates to verify two types of statements as quickly as possible: statements whose truth value was the same acro...

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