There are a series of statements that we consider evidently true, although we cannot explain why. It is what is known as common sense, something that we all have and that we are supposed to share with any reasonable person. However, even in those capsules of common sense that are sayings, it is also stated that it is the least common of the senses. Today Monday, the magazine PNAS publishes a study that attempts to quantify common sense, both for individuals and for society as a whole. In the work, which has taken a sample of 2,000 people who evaluated 4,400 statements, it is observed that the existence of a common sense shared by the entire society does not exist.
“Our findings suggest that there tends to be a reasonable amount of common sense between two people, but that as a society there is little common sense shared by everyone,” explains Mark Whiting, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the study. However, Whiting points out, people tend to see points of agreement with the people they deal with without realizing that, on a large scale, there are few things that everyone agrees on.
The questions included in the questionnaire to try to understand what is considered common sense and to what extent it is shared, included knowledge such as “triangles have three sides”, things that can be learned through experience, such as “a battery does not can provide energy forever” or moral statements such as “all human beings are created equal.” The results show that statements regarding physical reality or regarding the world as it is, such as that the Sun will rise tomorrow, are shared more frequently than those that refer to ideas regarding how things should be, such as that everyone has to have the same opportunities to access education. One of the types of statements that participants considered common sense less frequently were aphorisms.
Javier Vilanova, professor of philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid and author of the book common sense philosophy, states that “common sense is not seen so well in the description that one makes of a situation, but in how one acts.” That is why he believes that an experiment observing how people act, beyond the ideas they have regarding certain statements, can help better evaluate what is shared and what is not. “Where common sense is truly seen, and where it is developed, is in everyday life,” says Vilanova, who gives as an example the value of money as something that exists because there is a shared belief regarding that value.
One of the aspects that has caught the attention of the authors of the study is that demographic variables such as gender, income level or political preferences were not associated with what was perceived as common sense. However, it was with two tests, one that measures a person’s ability to reason beyond what their instinct tells them (the cognitive reflection test) and another that measures the ability to emotionally read others (the reading the mind in the eyes test). Vilanova believes that the lack of differences by social class or gender shows how “common sense is a unifying factor that allows people in a heterogeneous group to share something transversal.”
In the study published today PNAS, the authors try to overcome the vagueness that accompanies common sense, a sentiment that is often used as an argument for authority, but is not at all easy to define. To do this, participants must specify what is meaningful to them, but what they also believe is shared by others, something that goes beyond the usual perception of common sense. Normally, when one believes that something is common sense and another person disagrees, he simply thinks that the individual who does not share his view of common sense is wrong.
The authors of the study hope that the tool they have created can be used to study common sense in different contexts and see, for example, how it has changed over time or the differences between cultures. In the future, they plan to study whether statements in the political sphere tend to be framed worse in common sense than in everyday life situations or whether their use as part of political rhetoric degrades the term in the eyes of the public.
In the history of humanity, what is considered common sense has changed, in part thanks to the work of science, which often seems like an effort to know the reality that is hidden beneath deep-rooted perceptions. Until not so long ago, the idea that the Earth is flat or remains static seems more intuitive than the fact, revealed by rational observation, that it is a sphere that moves at more than 100,000 kilometers per hour around the Sun. However, , common sense as a starting point is necessary to make social relationships and even communication between scientists possible. Beyond that starting point, despite what the name suggests, the totality of each individual person’s common sense—the authors write—can be theirs alone.”
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