We tend to explain the world by pointing to what things are, not what they’re interacting with. A new analysis argues that this bias has repeatedly steered science down blind alleys.

The pattern shows up in classic missteps and in how people, even experts, reason today. The upshot: human cognition nudges theory toward inherent properties and away from the environment.

A team of psychology researchers from the University of Edinburgh and New York University mapped this recurring bias across history and in modern minds.

“Early scientific theories across multiple fields share a common pattern, in that they focus too much on built-in features and too little on interactions with surroundings,” said Zachary Horne, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh and the paper’s lead author.

“This bias appears throughout the history of science, and its ‘fingerprints’ can even be seen among scientists today.”

The bias behind early theories

The authors argue that many foundational explanations leaned on assumed inner essences. Medieval accounts of motion, for example, claimed projectiles carried an internal “impetus” that kept them going until it ran out. Only later did Galileo and Newton replace this with dynamics grounded in external forces.

Study co-author Andrei Cimpian highlighted the cost of our default lens: “Some of the most significant achievements have come about as a result of scientific ingenuity,” he said.

“But our cognitive processes, which favor explaining phenomena in terms of their inherent properties rather than external factors, seem to have historically slowed scientific discovery.”

The researchers use the label “inherence bias” for this systematic tilt toward built-in features.

Repeated bias in science

To test whether this pattern is widespread, the team surveyed historians of science in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Each historian listed major transitions: the initial explanation for an observation and the later, more accurate account.

One example is the explanation of tides. Early observers described them simply as the “tidal motions of Earth’s large bodies of water.”

Galileo suggested they were caused by the sloshing of oceans due to Earth’s motion, an idea researchers later categorized as an “inherent” explanation.

Over time, however, this view was replaced by a more accurate understanding. Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton demonstrated that tides are driven by the gravitational pull of the Moon – a model coded as “extrinsic” by the researchers.

Doctoral students trained in philosophy of science coded the responses as “inherent” or “extrinsic.” The vast majority of the nearly 80 initial explanations emphasized inherent properties; later explanations showed much less of that emphasis.

Brownian motion as a case study

Robert Brown’s 1827 observations offer a vivid example. Under the microscope, pollen grains suspended in water jittered.

Early on, many biologists invoked a “vital force” inside living matter. But the pattern didn’t fit the data.

Decades later, the correct mechanism pointed outward: rapid, unseen molecules in the surrounding water battering the grains. What looked like life’s essence was really interaction – now textbook “Brownian motion.”

Today’s scientists fall for bias

The authors then asked whether contemporary minds fall into the same groove. They ran experiments with practicing scientists, adult non-scientists, and children aged five to nine. Participants received real scientific observations they were unlikely to know and were asked to explain them.

Children, for instance, got: “why a hammer fell at the same speed as a feather on the Moon.” Adult non-scientists were asked to explain sediment appearing in distilled water after boiling.

Scientists confronted harder puzzles, such as why some planets lose mass over time, why a planet might have a given magnetosphere size, or why the tadpoles of the poisonous dart frog are not poisonous.

Across groups, first-pass theories leaned inward. When faced with sediment in boiled distilled water, one non-scientist reasoned that “heat caused the water to begin to turn into soil” – a throwback to ancient thinking.

Even experts showed the same pull, if in more technical language. On planetary mass loss, some cited “ejecta from volcanoes” and “transformation of matter on the planet into gas that dissipates away from the planet,” proposals that downplayed complex star-planet interactions.

Fixing science starts with minds

The researchers emphasized that these are not failures of scientists so much as features of human cognition. The world’s messiness tempts us to reach for what seems built in. That tendency can be productive at times, but it also detours progress when the real drivers are external forces and interactions.

“The path from initial explanatory intuitions to mature scientific understanding is rarely straightforward,” the authors wrote.

“This work suggests that one systematic source of detours may lie in our cognitive architecture itself – in the basic information processing constraints that guide how we first attempt to make sense of unfamiliar phenomena.”

“Understanding these constraints is crucial not just for advancing cognitive science, but also for improving how we train future generations of scientists.”

One bias shapes science’s path

History’s wrong turns were not random. They followed a recognizable bias toward inherent properties. That same bias shows up today in children, laypeople, and trained researchers when they explain unfamiliar phenomena.

Recognizing the pull of “inherence bias” can help teachers and scientists nudge thinking outward – toward context, interaction, and the environment – so our next theories start closer to the truth.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. 

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–