A Recent Study Explored Why People Disagree So Often And Found That Our Concepts About Even The Most Basic Words Vary Significantly

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.