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Last updated: Mon, Nov 18, 2024
I had the opportunity for a few years to work with a group of Instructional Designers. These are people with specialized training in how to develop training for others. They use an engineering methodology in developing instruction. We'd begin by defining verifiable goals for the instruction, such as "After completing the course, participants will be able to...."
To "understand" something was never an acceptable instructional goal, because its meaning is too vague. Here, though, I use the term "understanding" specifically because it is open-ended and implies any range of beliefs, attitudes, and practices.
There are some reliable generalizations about how people think that seem to be innate to humans. Just as our pain system is evolved (or, if you prefer, "adapted") for fitness in an environment, so is our ability to understand. We are taught and we study, but we also have some basic predelictions as far as what we make of our experiences. These generalizations are the findings of the specialty of cognitive psychology, which in the past has been done by observation of human behavior.
We know from cognitive psychology that we prefer simple formulations to complex ones. We rely on generalizations and use them a lot. We are willing to sacrifice accuracy to simplicity. This is increasingly so when under stress, whether the stress is due to time urgency, to the complexity of a situation, or to the issues at stake. We do not, in general, do a thorough job of editing the beliefs that we accept when we adopt them. Nor are we very good at erasing ideas once they have made themselves at home in our minds.
We may be intrigued by puzzles and mysteries, but we crave explanations. In fact, we each go through an exciting and annoying developmental stage when we discover that a lot of things have a "Why?" to them. I think of the fable "How the Elephant Got His Trunk" in this context. (His short snout was stretched out by a crocodile, according to the story.)
Like such fables, explanations tend to be in the form of narratives, stories that account for what we see. Generalizations aren't narratives, but they are useful because they condense knowledge. "Don't eat red fruit unless you know it's safe" is an example.
Explanations and generalizations help us to condense and organize what we believe to be true.
If we benefit from explanations and generalizations, it is because they simplify the organization and retrieval of our knowledge. (This is so whether that knowledge is true or not.) While we enjoy elaborate tales for entertainment, we process them sequentially, and we prefer simple narratives and simple generalizations so long as they work for us. When the world shows us evidence that our beliefs are inadequate we have the problem of modifying our beliefs or in some other way reconciling the new evidence with our beliefs. (Technically, this is cognitive dissonance.) Such reconciliation requires cognitive effort.
Seven +/- two demonstrates one of the ways that complexity overwhelms us. This is the number that cognitive psychologists say limits the number of items that we can hold in short-term memory (STM) at once. When the number of items or facts exceeds that number, other items that came into memory earlier are displaced and forgotten. It takes time and mental energy to move an item from STM into medium-term memory. When facts arrive too fast, we must either write them down (old-school) or type them in, if we want to use them.
To sit under an apple tree and ponder why an apple should fall to the ground (as did Isaac Newton) is a pretty unnatural act. It is effortful and it requires us to withdraw our attention from our immediate environment and to think abstractly. Our environments are full of things that are more biologically important than a mathematical understanding of gravity. Even in modern life, where physical threats are limited, our environments are full of other humans, to whom we are very much attuned. Just being alive requires a lot of cognitive activity.
When we are faced with decisions, it is very rare to think things through. We use shortcuts instead. We either use habitual responses or we apply heuristics, simple rules of thumb that work most of the time.
Even beyond this, it appears that many of the choices we appear to make are made without any generative thought. See Human Nature.
When a business or a researcher builds a database, they take steps to insure that the data they record are accurate. False data in the database leads to errors in the business or in the research.
Not so with people, in general. People in general are not good at selecting what data (facts, generalizations, narratives) enter their own individual databases (their memories). A lot of un-vetted information gets in while we are too young to be capable of minding our own gates. Even for adults it is hard to check the provenance of data, to check it for consistency with other knowledge, or even to ignore data that may be known to be suspicious.
Part of what we mean by "getting an education" is developing such skills and habits. It's hard work to learn and hard work to persist.
There is no "erase" function for our brains, as there is for computer or paper databases.
Once we accept facts, narratives, explanations, and other beliefs, we tend to stick with them. This is so for several reasons. It is very difficult to suppress beliefs once they form. It is difficult to critically review one's one knowledge. Beyond this, much of group identity is based on agreed perspectives, and social belonging is a strong imperative among humans.