Refining and Testing “Counterintuitiveness” in Virtual Reality: Cross-Cultural Evidence for Recall of Counterintuitive Representations

Abstract

The experiment presented provides partial cross-cultural empirical support for Pascal Boyer's theory of the transmission of minimally counterintuitive (MCI) ideas. Boyer hypothesized that concepts with a small number of counterintuitive features are better remembered and more faithfully communicated than extremely counterintuitive concepts or comparable ordinary or even unusual concepts. This transmission advantage may help to explain the cross-cultural ubiquity of religious/supernatural concepts, which often have counterintuitive features. The experiment was conducted in Second Life, an online 3D virtual world. Fifty English-speaking western participants and 51 Chinese-speaking participants from far-eastern nations viewed intuitive and counterintuitive test items and then were asked to free recall the displays immediately and after varying delays. Results show that MCI displays were not better recalled than intuitive displays at initial reporting. For both samples, however, the amount of time elapsed since exposure to the test items correlated significantly with memory degradation for intuitive concepts but not for counterintuitive concepts. These results suggest that although MCI concepts may not be more easily encoded than intuitive concepts, once they are encoded they may be more easily retrieved than intuitive concepts. Results also show that, among the westerners, increased age predicted poorer delayed recall of MCI but not intuitive items, suggesting that the MCI effect may bear most directly on transmitting ideas to adolescents and young adults.