Judging knot strength throws people for a loop: Experiment reveals new blind spot in our physical reasoning [View all]

[erronis]

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-strength-people-loop-reveals-physical.html
(Original article in MIT Press Express: https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00159/124792/Tangled-Physics-Knots-Strain-Intuitive-Physical)



For something that has been practiced for eons, this is amazing. Maybe it's because we're in the era of velcro, zip ties, and rubber bands.

We tie our shoes, we put on neckties, we wrestle with power cords. Yet despite deep familiarity with knots, most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them, new Johns Hopkins University research finds.

Researchers showed people pictures of two knots and asked them to point to the strongest one. They couldn't.

They showed people videos of each knot, where the knots spin slowly so they could get a good long look. They still failed.

People couldn't even manage it when researchers showed them each knot next to a diagram of the knots' construction.

"People are terrible at this," said co-author Chaz Firestone, who studies perception. "Humanity has been using knots for thousands of years. They're not that complicated—they're just some string tangled up. Yet you can show people real pictures of knots and ask them for any judgment about how the knot will behave and they have no clue."

The work, newly published in the journal Open Mind, reveals a new blind spot in our physical reasoning.