A Recent Study Explored Why People Disagree So Often And Found That Our Concepts About Even The Most Basic Words Vary Significantly
Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, recently used ridiculous-sounding questions to gain a better understanding of why we disagree with others so often during some of the most frustrating societal arguments.
Some of the questions included, “Is a penguin noisy?” and “Is a dog more similar to a chicken or an eagle?”
The study revealed that people’s concepts and associations with even very common words vary significantly. Additionally, people often overestimate just how many other people have the same conceptual beliefs– or mental grouping “shortcuts” that we create to understand similar events, objects, or words.
According to the researchers, this discrepancy is at the root of nearly all heated arguments and debates– whether they be at the family dinner table, in a classroom, or in a courtroom.
“The results offer an explanation for why people talk past each other. When people are disagreeing, it may not always be about what they think it is. It could be stemming from something as simple as their concepts not being aligned,” explained Celeste Kidd, the study’s principal investigator.
To help curb these misunderstandings, Kidd advised people to probe further– gaining clarification by asking questions as simple as, “What do you mean?” This can prevent debates from spiraling unnecessarily.
Now, disputes about the meaning of words are not a modern issue. For decades, we have seen debates about Constitution interpretations, religious texts, and in high school and college classroom discussions about subjects like philosophy and women’s studies.
Cognitive psychologists have also studied how and why people perceive and describe the world using different words. And it has been widely accepted that our own lived experiences impact how we view the world and subsequently approach issues or challenges in different ways.
Still, though, exactly how widely these approaches vary has not been well-studied.
fizkes – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
That’s why Kidd and her research team set out to recruit over 2,700 participants for her two-phase study.
During the first phase, the participant pool was divided in half and instructed to make similarity judgments about different animals. For instance, they might have been asked whether a dog was more similar to a chicken or an eagle.
Then, the other half of the group was instructed to make similarity judgments about politicians in the United States, such as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden.
These two topical categories were selected since they are quite different. While there is a greater likelihood of people viewing common animals similarly, politics can generate more debate due to the extreme variability of political views.
Interestingly, though, the researchers found that even a topic as simple as animals generated a lot of variabilities.
For instance, the team found only a 12% probability that two randomly selected people would share the same conceptual beliefs about penguins. This finding regarding penguins was specifically due to the fact that participants disagreed about if penguins are heavy or not.
“If people’s concepts are totally aligned, then all of those similarity judgments should be the same. If there’s variability in those judgments, that tells us there’s something compositionally that’s different,” Kidd explained.
The team also asked participants to estimate what percentage of people would agree with their responses. This revealed that people tended to think that approximately 66% of the population would agree with them. And in some cases, participants thought their beliefs were shared by the majority, even if practically no one else agreed.
So, the study found that if two people were picked at random during the study period– which was conducted between 2019 and 2021– then they were just as likely to disagree as agree.
And given the polarizing political climate of the last decade, it may not come as a surprise that political words were significantly less likely to hold one single meaning.
“People are not aware of that misalignment. People generally overestimate the degree to which other people will share the same concept as them when they’re speaking,” Kidd said.
During the second phase of the study, participants were then asked to list 10 single-word adjectives to describe the politicians and animals. Afterward, they were instructed to rate the politicians’ and animals’ features. For instance, the intelligence of a finch.
The researchers’ previous findings from phase one were only underscored, though, since they found that people had radically different definitions of basic concepts. On the one hand, participants were able to agree that seals do not have feathers; however, they did not agree about how graceful seals are.
Kidd believes this research is of utmost importance since it displays how most people we encounter and perhaps disagree with will not have the same concepts of even the most basic things, such as animals.
“When people are disagreeing, it may not always be about what they think it is. It could be stemming from something as simple as their concepts not being aligned,” Kidd concluded.
To read the study’s complete findings, which have since been published in MIT Press Direct, visit the link here.
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