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“What force acts on a coin that has been tossed up in the air”? The large majority of students who completed a course in mechanics in MIT gave the same wrong answer as the totally untrained students, citing the “original upward force of the hand”. The pet theory of motion at work here is that there’s no motion without force.

Pet theories are involuntary explanatory constructs that we all build from a very early age, in an attempt to understand the world around us, to build causal connections between events, and to enhance our sense of control over the environment. These theories are about every aspect of life. 

They are amazingly universal, are based on surface features of the relevant data, fragmented, inconsistent, contain principles that emerge spontaneously, complex, intricate, serviceable, and seemingly well organized. These robust theories are not normally tested against scientific, social or logical facts. A specialized psychological architecture that contains principles of quick reasoning, rapid accumulation of information, and economy of cognitive operations, may underlie and guide their construction and their perseverance in face of contradictory evidence.  

Pet theories inevitably imply what I termed here “naïve misconceptions”, that prove extremely resistant to change. When the naïve meets the academically acceptable theories we deliver in class, the better students either attempt to alter the new information, or combine the incompatible principles, or, most commonly, adapt the new theory as a “school bound” explanation, not applicable in everyday life.