Who’s More Apt To Believe In Word/Object Fit?
If you have a tendency to rely on quick explanations, using information that is easily available in your memory, are you also more likely to reason that words and objects fit particularly well together?
In a series of studies recently published in the journal Cognition, we asked people to think about how particular words came to be. For example, we asked children as young as four years old to think of a time when people didn’t have a word for a particular thing. We then asked how they thought the word came about. Did people have to call this animal a “zebra” (consistent with the idea that “zebra” just fits) or would other words have worked just as well?
For adults, we also asked more detailed questions, such as whether people had few or countless suitable options when coming up with a name for the animal. Additionally, to measure how reasoning about words relates to how people explain a broad range of regularities, we also asked participants to explain regularities other than language (such as mint toothpaste and round coins).
The more people underestimated the arbitrariness of words, the more they underestimated the influence of history and society on many other regularities. So, if they were a big believer in a word and object having a perfect fit, they were unlikely to consider historical or societal explanations for other kinds of everyday pairings. Instead, these people relied on information that came to mind more easily about the words, objects and other regularities themselves.
Importantly, we also found a drop in people’s belief that words fit with what they refer to when we experimentally lowered their tendency to rely on explanations that come to mind most easily. In this study, we gave half of our participants a story about why recycling bins are blue that included reasoning that would match the information that would come to mind most easily for people (including features of the color and how visible it is). The other half of our participants were given a story about the people involved in the original pilot recycling program arbitrarily choosing blue as the color for the bins.
The first story was meant to reinforce those participants' intuitive reasoning by including information that comes to mind most easily. On the other hand, the second story was meant to undermine the tendency to use information that comes to mind quickly by referencing the origins of the regularity and some of the happenstance around it. Those who read the second story were subsequently less likely than those who read the first story to believe that words fit particularly well with what they refer to.