TITLE: Preconception, Priming, and Learning
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 27, 2010 8:09 PM
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Earlier today,
@tonybibbs
tweeted about
this Slate article,
which describes how political marketers use the way
our minds work to slant how we think about candidates.
It reports on some studies from experimental psych
that found evidence for a disconcerting assertion:
Reminding people of their partisan loyalties makes
them more likely to buy smears about their political
opponents.
Our willingness to believe in smears is intricately
tied to our internal concepts of "us" and "them."
It does not matter how the "us" is defined.... The
moment you prompt people to see the world in terms
of us and them, you instantly make their minds
hospitable to slurs about people belonging to the
other group.
I wondered out loud on Twitter whether knowing this
about how our minds work can help us combat the
effects of such manipulation and thus to act more
rationally. Given that the cues in these studies
were so brief as to bypass conscious thought, I am
not especially hopeful.
As you might imagine, the findings of these studies
concern me, not only with regard to the possibility
of an informed and rational electorate but also for
what it means about my own personal behavior in the
political marketplace. Walking across campus this
afternoon, though, it occurred to me that as much
as I care for the political implications, these
findings might have a more immediate effect on my
life as an instructor.
Every learner comes to a classroom or to a textbook
with preconceptions. As far as I know, the physics
education community has done more than other
science communities to study the preconceptions
novice students bring to their classrooms. However,
they have also learned that their intro courses
tend to make things worse.
We in computer science often make things worse, too,
but we don't know much about how or why!
The findings about bias and priming in political
communication make me wonder what the implications
of bias and priming might be for learning,
especially computer science. Are students'
preconceptions about CS enough like the partisan
loyalties people have in politics to make the
findings relevant? I doubt students have the same
"us versus them" mentality about technical academic
subjects as about politics, but research has shown
that many non-CS students think that programmers
are a different sort of people than themselves.
This might lead to something of a "family" effect.
If so, then the priming effect exposed in the studies
might also apply in some way. My first thought was
of inadvertent priming, in which we send
signals unintentionally that reinforce biases against
learning to program or that strengthen misconceptions
about computing. I realized later that inadvertent
priming could also have positive effects. That side
of the continuum seems inherently less interesting to
me, but perhaps it shouldn't. It is good to know
what we are doing right as well as what we are doing
wrong.
My second thought was of how we might intentionally
prime the mind to improve learning. Intentional
priming is the focus of the Slate article, due
to the nefarious ways in which political operatives use
it to create misinformation and influence voter behavior.
We teachers are in the business of shaping minds, too,
but in good ways, affecting both the content and the
form of student thinking. Educators should use what
scientists learn about how the human mind works to do
their job more effectively. This may be an opportunity.
Cognitive psychology is the science that underlies
learning and teaching. We educators should look for
more ways to use it to do our jobs better.
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(I need to track down citations for some of the claims
I reference above, such as studies of naive physics
and studies of how non-computing and novice computing
students view programmers as a different breed. If
you have any at hand, I'd love to
hear from you.)
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