Folk Science

What is folk science?

Folk science describes ways of understanding and predicting the natural and social world, without the use of rigorous methodologies (see scientific method). One could label all understanding of nature predating the Greeks as "folk science." Folk science is often accepted as "common wisdom" in a given culture and gets passed on from generation to generation. In psychology and anthropology, scholars use the term folk science to characterize systems of knowledge relying either on intuition or on empiricism in its crudest form. Folk science is often thought of as laypeople’s mechanistic understandings of the natural and the artifactual worlds.

All of us, from the most sophisticated adults to the youngest children, often engage in what is commonly called “folk science,” that is, certain ways of understanding the natural and artificial world that arise more informally and not as direct reflections of formal instruction in scientific principles (Carey, 1988). Without explicit instruction in areas of science, people seem to develop domain-specific ways of thinking about relatively bounded sets of phenomena such as the behavior of solid objects, living kinds, and the minds of others (Carey, 1985; Carey & Spelke, 1996; Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996).

Common examples of folk science

1. Feed a cold, starve a fever

2. Chewing gum stays in your stomach forever

3. Swallowing pits/seeds will make a tree grow in your stomach

4. Tarot card reading

5. What goes up must come down.

6. A dropped object falls straight down.

7. A solid object cannot pass through another solid object.

8. The Earth is flat.

9. Celestial bodies revolve around Earth.

10. The heavier ball falls faster than the lighter one.

11. Don't swim after eating

12. Hot tubs prevent pregnancy

Who subscribes to folk science beliefs (the audience)?

Deciding who subscribes to folk science is not easy. Historically, everyone is subject to believe in folk science at some level. The extent to which each person subscribes to folk science is determined by many factors including their religious beliefs, level of education, political views, and cultural domination.

Despite having highly impoverished understandings of the world at the mechanistic level, children and adults alike have strong interests in mechanistic explanations. These interests in mechanisms may support the development of folk-scientific understandings by enabling even the very young to build a sense of causal patterns that exist far above the level of mechanisms. That sense of causal patterns then works in combination with strategies for identifying and evaluating both experts and their explanations, enabling laypeople of all ages to supplement their highly incomplete knowledge by accessing and relying on the divisions of cognitive labor that exist in all cultures (Keil, 2012).

How can we avoid falling for these misconceptions?

According to Scientific American, the reason folk science so often gets it wrong is that we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we now live. Our senses are geared for perceiving objects of middling size--between, say, ants and mountains--not bacteria, molecules and atoms on one end of the scale and stars and galaxies on the other end. We live a scant three score and 10 years, far too short a time to witness evolution, continental drift or long-term environmental changes. Taking this into consideration, one way we can avoid falling for folk science-based misconceptions is by creating secondary science education lessons that address these concerns. Namely, students should engage in activities where they familiarize themselves with the scale of the universe in terms of time and size (example activity). Additionally, by ensuring that students have mechanistic explanations for scientific phenomena such as continental drift, they will be less likely to contribute it to folk science beliefs. That can be achieved by having students explore maps featuring the distribution of ancient fossils, rocks, and mountain ranges.

Although children may occasionally ask “why” or “how” questions as ways of merely engaging adults, they often expect mechanism-rich responses from them. So why not give it to them? For example, if a child asks why the sky is blue and is told that all skies are blue (or worse, is given a folk science explanation), she will be more likely to then ask more “why” questions than she would if she had been given a mechanistic answer about air particles absorbing certain colors of light (such mechanistic answers can also invite further “why” questions, but they do so to a lesser extent). Also, in providing the child with a mechanistic explanation, we avoid having them develop folk-scientific understandings.

One of the big challenges is the ability of individuals to critically evaluate online information. Students are typically directed to utilize a checklist approach as they evaluate online information. This means that students carry a list of questions to consider as they examine digital content online.

Useful Links

1. The Feasibility of Folk Science

2. Running on Empty? How Folk Science Gets By With Less

3. Folk Science - Why our intuitions about how the world works are often wrong

4. The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth

5. The pervasiveness and policy consequences of medical folk wisdom in the U.S