Playing Cards with Thomas Kuhn: A Critical Reexamination of the Bruner and Postman (1949) Experiment

Abstract

Two experiments replicated Bruner and Postman (1949) , on which Kuhn (1962 , 1970 ) relied in his argument that humans resist experience that is incongruous with their expectations—an argument essential to Kuhn's thesis of scientific revolutions. The first experiment measured reaction times for identifying playing card stimuli in three conditions: (a) where all the stimuli were standard playing cards, (b) where stimuli had color reversed (trick), or (c) which included both regular and trick card stimuli (mixed set). Participants were equally adept at identifying regular and trick stimuli in homogenous sets but took longer to identify the same stimuli in a mixed set. The second experiment, a conceptual replication of Bruner and Postman's original experiment, obtained recognition thresholds for regular and trick stimuli while measuring participants’ frustration. Participants responded similarly to procedural difficulties for both trick and regular stimuli. An analysis of participants’ responses shows that participants used systematic trial-and-error strategy to identify any ambiguous stimulus. These findings are inconsistent with an interpretation of resistance to incongruities.