Surprise!

Slate:

If I could ensure that kids come away from science class with one thing only, it wouldn’t be a set of facts. It would be an attitude—something that the late physicist Richard Feynman called “scientific integrity,” the willingness to bend over backward to examine reasons your pet theories about the world might be wrong. “That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school,” Feynman said in a 1974 commencement speech. “We never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.”

…

In other words, we need to actively look for signs that our assumptions are wrong, because we won’t do so unprompted. One such sign, scientists have suggested, is the feeling of surprise. “Brains are continuously making predictions,” psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains in his book Stumbling on Happiness—about how a friend is likely to react when you greet her, about what will happen after you knock a glass off the table, even about what sort of word you’re going to see at the end of a sentence.

…

Scientists are human, of course, so they feel the temptation to ignore or explain away anomalies. But the ability to resist that temptation is what produces good science. Psychologist Kevin Dunbar has spent his career studying how scientists think, and he’s found that the more experienced a scientist is, the more likely she is to investigate surprising results rather than ignore them.

Read the whole story: Slate