Investigating the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect

Scholars believe that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable than intuitive ones (Barrett, 2008; Upal 2011). If an item has an unusual or counterintuitive property, such as a ball that rises rather than falls when dropped, the unusual property makes the item more memorable. However, experiments investigating this effect tend to have experimental confounds that make interpretation difficult. Our experiment aimed to solve these problems by using counterbalanced lists of nonwords, using the nonwords to control for prior associations and experiences. Participants viewed a series of nonwords along with a noun-adjective pair (e.g. Frav – a roaring tiger) and were told that each nonword represented a name. Some nonwords were the names of an intuitive item (e.g. a roaring tiger) whereas others were counterintuitive (e.g. a writing tiger). Participants rated the likelihood that the described nonword was from Earth or from a parallel universe where things were different. Everyone was told to remember the nonwords and noun-adjective pairs for a later test. To improve overall recall, each item was presented and rated twice. After a distractor, participants were asked to recall as many of the nonwords as possible. The results revealed that counterintuitive items were not better-recalled than intuitive items. In fact, in most tests, intuitive items were recalled significantly more often than intuitive items. Our results do not support the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect and suggest that when to-be-remembered words and their accompanying nouns are matched across conditions (counterintuitive and intuitive), that intuitive information is more memorable than counterintuitive information