Now if you didn’t try it out, too bad. The problem can seem deceivingly simple and turn out to be damn hard.

This exercise was devised in a 2006 study — The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work — by Rebecca Lawson from the University of Liverpool.

Methodology

Eighty-one unpaid volunteers were tested in three groups. They were prospective psychology students, their parents who had come to the University of Liverpool for an Open Day, and psychology undergraduates.

Results: 40% of us aren’t too good at this

Over 40% of nonexperts made at least one error in both the drawing and the forced-choice tasks (Part 2 for us). In this and the subsequent experiments, error scores were almost as high on the forced-choice task as on the freehand drawing task, indicating that production problems were not the primary cause of people’s deficiencies.

Telling people the purpose of the experiment doesn’t change the result much

In a variation of the experiment, “participants were informed that their functional knowledge of bicycles was going to be investigated”. Sort of what we did here — you did have a solid hint that your knowledge of bicycles was being tested. The result? People still made the same number of mistakes, on average.

Examples aka ‘look at what others did to feel good about your own sketch’

No. No No No NONO.

Bad news — it’s not just cycles

For example, the layperson may not understand thermostats either.

Norman (2002) has argued that everyone forms theories about how everyday objects function to explain what they have observed. Norman, however, suggests that these explanations may be based on weak, fragmentary, or even inaccurate evidence. One example involves the room thermostat. People often try to quickly heat up a room by turning the thermostat all the way up. Norman suggests that this is because they have an incorrect explanation for how the thermostat works. He notes, “In the case of the thermostat, the design gives absolutely no hint as to the correct answer. In the absence of external information, people are free to let their imaginations run free”.

Can you draw a coin? Or the road sign for a crosswalk?

People have been found to have surprisingly poor perceptual memory for everyday objects such as coins and road signs. Marmie and Healy found that recall of the features of coins and their spatial position was much improved after just 15 sec of intentional learning and that intentional study produced large benefits, even when recall was delayed by one week.

So what does all this tell us?

Many things. You may hate the idea of reading a research paper, but it’s highly recommended that you give this one a chance. Here’s the link to it again.

Here are some of the things we can conclude or guess:

We tend to overestimate what and how much we know.

“Often only mundane, general knowledge — not sophisticated, domain-specific information — may be available to us.”

We can learn — and it may not need too much effort. The coin example above should give you lots of hope.

But perhaps most importantly…

We learn by active engagement.

It is unlikely you will forget soon what a cycle looks like and how it works because now you’ve spent some time on the problem. If you’re a teacher reading this, remember this. The next time you teach, remember that you could teach better, much better, by making the learning process active.

With ❤ from Acadly. Aaand here’s our promo!

Bonus