Chapter 12 page 268
demonstration in which a heavy book and a coin fall at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time.
The article by Chinn and Brewer presents many examples in which science students resist changing beliefs
in response to new evidence.
How People Discount Anomalous Evidence
When people encounter evidence that contradicts their current beliefs, we can say that this evidence is
anomalous for their current beliefs. When people encounter anomalous evidence, they tend to resist
changing their beliefs. Chinn and Brewer (1992, 1993, 1998; Brewer & Chinn, 1994) have investigated the
different ways in which people can respond to information that contradicts what they currently believe.
According to the most recent version of their analysis, there are eight ways in which people can respond to
anomalous data (i.e., data or evidence that contradicts their current beliefs).
The eight responses are:
- ignoring
- rejection
- uncertainty
- exclusion
- abeyance
- reinterpretation
- peripheral theory change
- theory change
Notice that theory change is only one of the eight possible responses. If you are trying to lead your
students to change their theory about something, your students have seven responses to the information you
present besides changing their theory! As you can easily see, the odds are stacked against you.
Here is an example from social studies. Suppose you have discovered a male middle school student
who thinks that rivers run from north to south. You show the student on a map of North America that the
MacKenzie river in Canada flows from south to north. According to the chart below, there are eight
possible responses the student could make to this anomalous evidence. The chart shows that you can ask
yourself three questions in order to figure out how to classify each response.