The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word “penguin” as “the general term for any erect, short-legged, flightless waterfowl (penguin family) of the Southern Hemisphere.” While this explanation seems straightforward, the definition is not what people have in mind when they actually use the word. Instead, people think about concepts. That is, the myriad of characteristics, ideas, examples, and associations that come to mind when thinking about words.
Our concepts matter to what exactly we mean when we use language, and a new study shows that concepts people retain are surprisingly frequent, even for words like penguin. This does not mean that everyone disagrees on the basic definition of a penguin. But some consider them loud and plump creatures, more like whales than eagles, while others think them clumsy and strange, more like ostriches than dolphins.
These contradictory views—the penguin concept—are a sort of informatics researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, drawn from participants in a study published last month. The team’s results show that even the simplest noun can evoke dozens of different concepts in an individual’s mind. It blows my mind,” says senior author of the study, psychologist Celeste Kidd of the University of California, Berkeley.
To make matters worse, researchers found that people were typically oblivious to these differences, believing that most people think the same way they do, even when few think. This may be one reason why people often have conflicts. “I think this explains a lot of the disagreements people have,” says Kidd. “It’s an approach to understanding why people walk past each other.” She adds that it might help “get in.”
Determining the extent to which people’s notions of things agree is a problem that has long puzzled philosophers, psychologists, and linguists. It is well known that there is frequent debate about what exactly abstract and high-level concepts such as “knowledge” and “fairness” mean. But researchers have struggled to formally characterize how people’s concepts differ and quantify how often that happens. It is said that it ended in failure.
It’s not that researchers don’t know anything. A famous 1984 study found that the concepts young children have for words often consist of a collection of observable properties known as features. For example, consider the word “uncle”. “For a four-year-old, an uncle is someone who gives presents at Christmas and reconciles with their parents,” says psychologist James Hampton of the City University of London. Older children develop concepts that have some reason behind them. “For an eight-year-old, the uncle is the parent’s boy brother,” says Hampton. “They move from being based on the traits they observe to understanding something deeper and more relevant.” This more sophisticated understanding evolves as children interact with their surroundings. , is explained by a model of how cognition develops, which psychologists call “theory theories”.
Hampton’s work promoted the idea that a “prototype” is the basis of a concept. A prototype is a set of features that determine how typical a particular instance of something is in terms of a broader category. For example, the blackbird is closer to the archetype bird than the penguin. There are many studies behind these ideas, all of which may have some role in human cognition. But that still leaves the much debated question of what exactly is on people’s minds when they ponder certain words. has been a mystery until now.
Instead of trying to address the debate about the nature of the concept, Kidd and her team circumvented the debate by using a method they tried to detect. Several But not all differences between people. In the researchers’ first experiment, they asked about 1,800 participants to make similarity judgments, such as “Which one most resembles a penguin, a finch, or a dolphin?” The second asked for feature judgments such as “Are penguins noisy?” We then used a mathematical clustering method to estimate the number of distinct concepts present in our sample of participants, and then extrapolated that estimate globally. , suggests that there are at least 10 to 30 quantitatively different variations of the concept. Even common nouns such as penguin. These are rough estimates, but perhaps conservative ones, researchers say. has said.
Participants didn’t just disagree about penguins. Researchers disagree on key issues such as whether seals are graceful, and have found that different concepts exist for different words they use. In addition to animals, the team used the names of politicians such as George W. Bush and Joe Biden, and found that there were even more variations in participants’ notions of these words. It confirms what many people have been gnawing about for a while, with real data,” said King’s College London, who was not involved in the study but is working on climate change communication. says neuroscientist Chris De Meyer.
Although the researchers had expected people’s notions of politicians to vary widely due to differences in political beliefs, they were surprised by the diversity they found for basic animal notions. “There’s about a 12% chance that two of her people who are randomly selected share the same notion about penguins,” Kidd says. For example, “We disagree about whether penguins are heavy or not, probably because we’ve never lifted one.” Here, Kidd suggests where many of these differences likely come from: doing. They boil down to a person’s life experience. ’ says Kidd. “If you’ve spent time studying anatomy, you’ve learned that birds have light skeletons, so you might think penguins are light.” . Professional philosophers have a very different concept of “knowledge” than most people. Researchers have studied this effect of training, but such observations tell us little about how often people’s concepts differ. The findings suggest that conceptual differences are so common that they are probably fundamental to how we think about things.
This research does not show that people do not have a common understanding. No one confuses penguins with albatrosses. “There’s something in common,” says Susan Gelman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who is doing it. “But maybe everything that clings to it [words] Much more singular and diverse than we thought. “
In a recent study, researchers asked participants how many people agreed with similarity judgments and compared these responses to the actual numbers. Participants thought that about two-thirds would agree with them when the actual percentage was usually much smaller. In some cases, people believed they were in the majority when virtually no one agreed. This shows that people are typically unaware of the extent to which others share their concepts.“It was great,” he says Gelman.
This finding may be related to disagreements on a more serious issue than whether penguins are heavy. “If this happens with common nouns, how bad can it be with the abstract language we use to describe the big problem we’re dealing with?” says De Meyer. “These methods show that people have different notions of inequality, equity, climate change, 2 degrees, all the words we use to describe things that matter to us. will show you.”
“When people disagree, it may not be for the reasons they think they are.” says Kidd. “It might be because their concepts don’t match.” Her advice: “Hash it,” she says. It goes a long way in preventing conflicts from derailing. “
