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The Formation of Belief 301

word and replace the mental model of a flat surface with the mental model of
a sphere. However, research by Joseph nussbaum, stella vosniadou and others
on young children’s mental models of the earth has revealed a different out-
come: The seemingly simple statement is assimilated to the child’s flat earth
model. 19
To see the mechanism of assimilation operating in this case, consider the
options open to the child. What could the adult mean by saying that the earth
is round? The word “round” is ambiguous; it is used to refer to both circular
(a two-dimensional property) and spherical (a three-dimensional property).
Which of these meanings will be activated? Unless the child conceives the
earth as extending indefinitely in all directions, the flat earth must have an
edge somewhere, and an edge is a kind of thing that can be circular. The child
is likely to conclude that the adult is saying that the flat earth has a circular
edge. in our work with schoolchildren Jason Leigh, Andrew Johnson, Thomas
Moher and i often observed that when asked to draw the earth, the children
20
unhesitatingly drew a circle. When asked which direction is upward with
respect to this circle, some children held their pencil perpendicular to their
drawing, with the tip of the pencil pointing toward the ceiling. The drawing
was not intended as a two-dimensional rendering of a sphere, but as a top-
down view of a pancake earth. in short, if the listener believes that the earth is
flat, the apparently contradictory discourse, the Earth is round has no power to
teach him or her otherwise, because the listener’s prior beliefs hold too much
power over its interpretation.
surely adults succeed in getting through to the child eventually? Holding
up a globe and saying, this is the Earth ought to settle the issue of circularity
versus sphericality. However, vosniadou and co-workers found evidence for
yet another assimilation at a later stage in the child’s development: Children
who accept that the earth is a sphere might nevertheless misunderstand the
situation in a way that allows them to retain the concept of a flat living space.
21
They documented that some children believe that the earth is spherical but
hollow, half filled with soil and with a hole near the top through which the
sun shines. We live inside this hollow sphere, walking about on the flat surface
formed by the soil that fills the lower half of the sphere. in this way, the asser-
tion that the earth is a sphere is assimilated to, and distorted to be consistent
with the prior belief that we live on an approximately flat surface.
in short, although writing and speaking seem like straightforward ways
to communicate a new idea, close analysis shows otherwise. Comprehension
poses multiple interpretive choices at the word, sentence and discourse lev-
els, and the choices depend so heavily on the recipient’s prior beliefs that the