Collaboration is generally an effective means of learning new information, but is collaboration productive in domains where collaborators may hold qualitatively different conceptions of the domain’s causal structure? We explored this question in the domain of evolutionary biology, where previous research has shown that most individuals construe evolution as the uniform transformation of an entire population (akin to metamorphosis) rather than the selective survival and reproduction of a subset of the population. College undergraduates (n = 44) completed an assessment of their evolutionary reasoning by themselves (pretest), with a partner (dyad test), and several weeks later (posttest). Collaboration proved ineffective for the higher- scoring partner in each dyad, as their scores generally remained unchanged from pretest to dyad test to posttest, but it proved effective for the lower-scoring partner. Not only did lower- scoring partners increase their score from pretest to dyad test, but they maintained higher scores at posttest as well. Follow- up analyses revealed that participants’ posttest scores were predicted by their partners’ pretest scores but only for lower- scoring partners, and the relation was negative: the smaller the difference between pretest score, the greater the gain from pretest to posttest for lower-scoring partners. These findings indicate that collaboration in domains characterized by conceptual change is possible, but that learning from such collaboration is asymmetric (i.e., individuals with low levels of understanding benefit more than their partners do) and unequal (i.e., individuals with low levels of understanding benefit more if their partner’s understanding is only moderately higher). Thus, bridging the gap between a novice’s view of a conceptually complex domain and an expert’s view appears to require instruction more aligned with the former than the latter.

Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition, impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some violations as “more impossible” than others (Shtulman & Morgan, 2017). When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells, American adults are influenced by seemingly irrelevant considerations, judging, for instance, that it would be more difficult to levitate a bowling ball than a basketball even though weight should no longer be a consideration if contact is no longer necessary for support. Here, we explore these effects in a non-Western context—China—where magical events are represented differently in fiction and reasoning styles are often more holistic than analytic. Across several studies, Chinese adults showed the same tendency as American adults to honor implicit causal constraints when evaluating the plausibility of magical events. These findings suggest that graded notions of impossibility are shared across cultures, possibly because they are a byproduct of causal knowledge.

A common intuition, often captured in fiction, is that some impossible events (e.g., levitating a stone) are “more impossible” than others (e.g., levitating a feather). We investigated the source of this intuition, hypothesizing that graded notions of impossibility arise from explanatory considerations logically precluded by the violation at hand but still taken into account. Studies 1-2 involved college undergraduates (n = 192), and Study 3 involved preschool-aged children (n = 32). In Study 1, participants saw pairs of magical events (spells) that violated one of 18 causal principles—six physical, six biological, and six psychological—and were asked to indicate which spell would be more difficult to learn. Both spells violated the same causal principle but differed in their relation to a subsidiary principle. Participants’ judgments of spell difficulty honored the subsidiary principle, even when participants were given the option of judging the two spells equally difficult. Study 2 replicated the effects of Study 1 with Likert-type ratings, and Study 3 replicated those effects in children. Taken together, these findings suggest that events that defy causal explanation are interpreted in terms of explanatory considerations that hold in the absence of such violations.

Intuitive explanations for natural phenomena are typically our default explanations, even after we have learned more accurate, scientific explanations (Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012). The current study examined whether priming students with scientific images improves their ability to verify counterintuitive scientific statements, like “bacteria need nutrients” and “bubbles have weight.” Participants (100 college undergraduates) verified scientific statements interspersed with images relevant to the predicates of those statements; the images depicted either schematic diagrams (scientific primes) or everyday scenes (intuitive primes). Scientific primes increased the accuracy of participants’ responses, relative to intuitive primes, but not the speed of those responses, indicating that scientific primes facilitate a preference for scientific ideas over intuitive ones but do not eliminate the initial conflict between them.