Minimal counterintuitiveness effect

Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer argued that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) i.e., concepts that violate a few ontological expectations of a category such as the category of an agent, are more memorable than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive (MXCI) concepts.^[1] A number of experimental psychology studies have found support for Boyer's hypothesis. Upal^[2] labelled this as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.

Boyer originally did not precisely specify the number of expectation-violations that would render an idea maximally counterintuitive. Early empirical studies including those by Boyer himself^[3] and others^[4] did not study MXCI concepts. Both these studies only used concepts violating a single expectation (which were labelled as MCI concepts). Atran^[5] was the first to study memory for MXCI concepts and labeled concepts violating 2-expectations as maximally counterintuitive. Studies by the I-75 Cognition and Culture Group^[6][7][8][9] also labelled ideas violating two expectations as maximally counterintuitive. Barrett^[10] argued that ideas violating 1 or 2 ontological expectations should be considered MCI and only ideas violating 3 or more expectations should be labelled MXCI. Subsequent studies^[11] of the MCI effect have followed this revised labelling scheme.

Upal^[12] has divided the cognitive accounts that explain the MCI effect into two categories: the context-based model of minimal counterintuitiveness, and content-based view of minimal counterintuitiveness. The context-based view emphasizes the role played by context in making an idea counterintuitive whereas the content-based view ignores the role of context.

See also

• Uncanny valley