Experts recognize that certain formative periods, known as developmental windows, are crucial for acquiring particular skills. For example, using vocalizations and words to interact with people in the first few years of life is critical for children’s language learning.
A recent study by an international team from UCLA, Romania and Israel suggests there may be a developmental window for reasoning skills as well—the first 25 years of life—and that a person’s social, political and economic environment strongly influences how they acquire these skills. Their findings are published in the journal PLOS One.
The researchers found that following the collapse of Romania’s authoritarian communist regime in 1989, the rapid increase in education and technology use and the transition from a single, government-controlled source of information to diverse sources had a strong effect on the way people, particularly younger generations, thought about and determined truthfulness, a process known as “epistemic thinking.”
Epistemic thinking runs the gamut from absolutist thinking, the belief that only one claim can be right, to multiplist thinking, the belief that more than one claim could be right—it’s just a matter of opinion. Finally, evaluativist thinking posits that assertions can be evaluated in terms of both logic and evidence.
“Whether we are monitoring various news sources or scrolling through a busy Twitter feed, we are constantly encountering diverse viewpoints about topics ranging from politics to films,” said the study’s first author, Amalia Ionescu, a doctoral student in psychology at UCLA. “Some of these topics carry infinitely more weight than others, but ultimately, we are using the same sort of mechanism when deciding how to make sense of contrasting viewpoints.”
2023-05-13 18:00:03
Article from phys.org