Is Empiricism Innate? Preference for Nurture over Nature in People’s Beliefs about the Origins of Human Knowledge

The origins of human knowledge are an enduring puzzle: what parts of what we know require learning, and what emerges regardless of experience? Despite nature-nurture defining debate for millennia and inspiring much contemporary research in psychology and neuroscience, it remains unknown whether people share intuitive, pre-scientific theories about the answer. Here in a series of experiments with 1188 participants, we find that people explain fundamental perceptual and cognitive abilities by appeal to learning and instruction, rather than genes or innateness. U.S. adults, adults from a culture with a belief in reincarnation, young children, and professional scientists-- including psychologists and neuroscientists, all believed these basic abilities to emerge significantly later than they actually do, and ascribed them to nurture rather than nature. These findings suggest that, regardless of age, culture, and education, people share an intuitive empiricist theory about the human mind.