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The podcast about everyday stuff that turns out to be older, weirder, and way more meaningful than we realized.
Introduction
You're in a work meeting. Your boss is suggesting something about training, and suggests that maybe the visual learners will benefit from more video.
Everyone nods. Someone suggests providing something for the hands-on learners. Nods again. Maybe someone even says the olfactory learners should encounter certain smells.
And now you’re faced with a dilemma. You know that “learning styles” has been debunked by science. But you know if you speak up, you might lose some friends. You might start an argument. There’s a strong social pressure here to just go along with the crowd.
Besides, what are you going to say? I guess you could say something like:
Learning styles. It's probably a folk thing.
[Intro Music]
Welcome to It's Probably a Folk Thing: the podcast about everyday experiences that turn out to be older, weirder, and far more meaningful than we realized. I'm Aaron Crawford, and today we're going somewhere the show doesn't usually go. We're talking about a belief that millions of people hold, that entire school systems have been built around, and that has been thoroughly, repeatedly debunked by science.
Learning styles.
But this episode isn't really about learning styles. It's about what happens when a folk belief gets so deeply embedded that facts can't dig it out.
01:36 Segment 1 - Folk Beliefs
Let’s start by discussing folk beliefs in general. I’ll give you a few examples.
Your grandmother probably told you that cracking your knuckles would give you arthritis. She was wrong. But you still hear her voice every time you do it.
Someone told you that you lose most of your body heat through your head. You don't. But you wore the hat anyway.
You waited thirty minutes after eating before you got back in the pool. There was no medical reason to wait. But your mom said so, and your mom's mom said so, and nobody was going to be the first to test it.
These are folk beliefs. They're claims that circulate informally, feel true, resist correction, and keep spreading anyway. They're not legends. Legends are narratives with characters and a plot - like the Box Elder/Roy color-swap story we covered in episode 2. Folk beliefs don't need a story. They just need to sound right and get repeated by someone you trust.
Now here's one thing to know: Folk beliefs aren't always wrong. Your grandmother probably also told you to eat warm honey when you had a sore throat. Turns out there's real evidence that honey coats and soothes inflamed tissue and has mild antimicrobial properties. Grandma was right. But she wasn't right because she read a study. She was right because the folk belief happened to line up with reality. What makes it a folk belief isn't whether it's true or false. It's how it travels. From person to person and generation to generation, with no citation needed.
Folk beliefs are folklore's quietest category. They don't look like folklore; they look like facts.
03:27 Segment 2 - Learning Styles
Now here's an extremely common folk belief: Individuals have a dominant learning style. They’re visual learners, or auditory learners, or kinesthetic learners. If you teach someone in their preferred style, they learn better. And if you don't align with their style, it’s harder – or impossible – to learn.
It sounds scientific. It sounds like something researchers figured out, standing around in lab coats, watching other people. And that's part of why it works so well as a folk belief. It borrows the language and the authority of science without actually being science.
Speaking of science: Cognitive scientists have tested this. Repeatedly. The consistent finding is that matching instruction to a supposed learning style does not improve outcomes. People do have preferences, sure. You might prefer diagrams. You might prefer listening. But preferring something and learning better from it are not the same thing. Incidentally, if you’re listening and thinking “he’s wrong on this one,” just search it yourself. Use the words “learning style myth.” (By the way, I hate calling it a myth, because that’s a folklore term. But it’s also how you find things online sometimes.)
And yet the belief in learning styles persists. It shows up in teacher training. It shows up in corporate workshops. It shows up in casual conversation as settled fact. I’ve been in meetings where experienced educators I really respect have brought it up as though it were as solidly undeniable as gravity.
Why? Because the belief wasn't transmitted as science. It was transmitted as folklore.
05:20 Segment 3 - Why Folk Beliefs Survive Debunking
Now I don’t want to suddenly become a podcast about pedagogy. I just want to use this example to illustrate a folkloristic point.
Nobody holds onto "wait thirty minutes before swimming" because of a clinical trial. They hold onto it because their mom said it, and their mom was looking out for them, and the belief carries the warmth of that protection. The folk belief does emotional work. The scientific background is really irrelevant.
Learning styles works the same way. It gives teachers a framework that feels actionable. It gives parents a reason their child is struggling that isn't painful. It gives learners a story about themselves that's flattering: "I'm not bad at this. I just wasn't taught in my style."
That's a folkloric function. Folk beliefs persist when they do emotional and social work. They persist when they explain, comfort, or organize experience in a way that feels useful. In folklore, accuracy is secondary. Function is the primary concern.
And any folk belief has one more advantage over science: Folk belief tends to be simple. "People learn differently" is easy to say, easy to remember, and easy to pass along. "The evidence does not support matching instructional modality to self-reported learning preferences" is not a sentence any normal person repeats at a barbecue.
Folklore almost always wins the simplicity contest. That's part of why it spreads.
07:01 Segment 4 - The Cost of Seeing It
I want to be honest about something. Studying folklore has a downside that nobody warns you about.
Once you learn to recognize folk beliefs – and urban legends – you start seeing them everywhere. In meetings. At family dinners. In the confident assertions of people you respect. And you face a choice: Do I say something, or not?
Most of the time, you don't. Because folk beliefs are socially reinforced. Everyone in the room nods. Everyone agrees. The belief isn't just an idea someone holds privately. It's a shared commitment. And challenging it doesn't feel like correcting a fact. It feels like breaking ranks.
That's folk social control, which we talked about in the Christmas music episode (episode 13, for those who care enough to go back and give it a listen). The group enforces the belief with social pressure - not with arguments. You don't suddenly open up a debate. You become the recipient of an annoyed stare.
I chose learning styles to illustrate folk belief because it’s a safe example. I can talk about it here because the stakes are low. I don’t think anybody’s core identity is threatened by hearing that learning styles aren't scientifically supported. But there are other folk beliefs out there where the social cost of saying "oh, that’s a folk belief " is much, much higher. I don't think I need to name them. Just visit your favorite political website and you’ll find one.
08:34 Closing
So the next time you're in a room and someone says something, and everyone nods along to it. The kind of thing that nobody questions, pause and ask yourself: Is this a real fact? Or is this a folk belief? And if so, what functions is it filling?
You might not say it out loud. I usually don't.
But you'll know that…
It's definitely a folk thing.
Until Next Time.