Intuitions About Science, Technology, and Nature: A Fruitful Approach to Understand Judgments About Socio-Scientific Issues - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 87

of mankind, technology, and nature provide an essential and not to be ignored
background of science education.
Decision-making processes also take place in the background. The philosopher
R.M. Hare distinguishes between the intuitive morality, determining everyday life,
and the reflective morality, acting in which one abandons the habits of daily life to
face ethical questions with distance (Hare, 1981 ). In this regard, socio-scientific
issues are of equal importance in the background as well as in the foreground. In the
foreground they can become an explicit topic of interest in, for instance, addressing
the public discussion about technological impact assessment in science classes
(Hodson, 2003 ). Simultaneously, these aspects operate implicitly in the background
when simply teaching the molecular basics of genetic engineering without explic-
itly going into the discussion about socio-scientific issues. In that way, science
education can impart ideas of scientific progress and at the same time evoke
intuitions about the limits of legitimate research.

2 Decision-Making Processes from a Psychological Point
of View: Intuitive and Reflective Thinking

As early as 100 years ago, Freud introduced the distinction of conscious and
unconscious processes by psychoanalysis. According to Freud, the irresolvable
interlocking of both areas constitutes the basic conditions of human psychic life.
Reflection and perception of the outside world therefore always bear traces of
unconscious processes:
“The unconscious must [ ] be accepted as the general basis for psychic life. The

unconscious is the bigger circle enclosing the smaller one of the conscious; everything
conscious has an unconscious pre-stage, while the unconscious stays at this stage and can
nevertheless demand the overall quality of a psychological achievement. The unconscious
is the actually real psychic, from its inner nature so unknown to us like the real outside
world and equally incomplete, provided to us by the data of the consciousness like the
outside world by the data of our sense organs” (Freud, 1900 /1972, p. 617, translated by the
authors).
The central keystone of the psychoanalytical view is the supposition of an
unconscious, which conditions our behavior, emotions, and thinking far more
than we are aware of. This implicational relation between consciousness and
unconscious, between rational and irrational processes, between inner fantasies,
latent structures of meaning, and outer conditions is taken up by modern psychol-
ogy, which establishes its empirical foundation.
Perception itself is not a process of a neutral description of the environment but a
selective translation of sense data regarding preexisting and not necessarily con-
scious memories (Anderson, 1983 ). The activation of associative nodes can be
about factual information as well as topics that are set in context for other reasons
(e.g., similarity or experience). Based on this, intuitions are understood as uncon-
scious cognitions whose genesis remains hidden because only the result of thinking

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