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Why some people (mistakenly) think they are eg. "kinesthetic learners"

A graphical artist youtuber whose videos I often watch likes to emphasize how he is "a kinesthetic learner", making that a core point in several of his videos (especially in one where he was being taught by someone how to make simple electric circuits to add led lights to his sculptures).

"Kinesthetic learning" means essentially "learning by doing", in other words, you learn most efficiently by actually doing the thing you want to learn, rather than just it being explained to you, or seeing it done.

Other forms of learning, at least categorized with this same idea, are "visual learning", where something is learned best by visual means, eg. by pictures, graphs, illustrations and demonstration videos, or seeing someone doing it, "auditory learning", learning something via speech, and "read/write learning", learning something by reading about it, or writing down what you have learned (the idea with this last one is that when you actually write down something you are learning, it helps you remember it better, not in the sense of you being able to refer to what you have written, but with the mere fact that you actually wrote it down, and needed to clearly express yourself clearly to do so, it just helps you better remember it lately, as you formulated it more clearly and concretely to yourself).

These are legit forms of learning. Some people, however, have this misconception that they are better at a particular form of learning, or even that they are almost exclusively that "type of learner", and that they have great difficulty in learning something in another way. Like this particular artist insisting that he's "a kinesthetic learner" and showing hesitancy at learning something new eg. by it being explained and shown to them (like in this case simple electronics).

Studies have shown, however, that this is largely a misconception. Nobody is exclusively, or even primarily, of a particular "type of learner". Everybody can learn things best using any of the above methods. Some methods of learning are better for some particular kinds things, but other methods are better for other kinds of things, and there isn't any singular method of learning that applies to everything (or even most things) for a person.

Experiments show that when people who think that they are "a visual learner", or "a kinesthetic learner", need to learn something particularly suited for a different method of learning, they actually learn it much better using that other method than what they claimed themselves to be their best method. This especially when they weren't aware that it was a test to see which learning method would be most efficient for a particular task. (Such people are often surprised to find out that they learned the thing better using another learning method than their preferred one, especially when they weren't aware that this was a learning test, and thus they couldn't be prejudiced against a particular learning method.)

But why do people still believe that they are a particular type of learner? Why does this graphical artist, for example, believe that he's "a kinesthetic learner", even though surely he as learned a lot of things using other methods, and keeps learning things using other methods? Why doesn't he notice this and change his perception of himself?

What I think is happening here is a form of confirmation bias.

He has ingrained "I'm a kinesthetic learner" so deeply into his consciousness, that whenever he does indeed learn something new (or learns to become better at something) via practice, via physically doing that thing, he notices it, and he kind of adds it to his personal collection of evidence that he is indeed a "kinesthetic learner".

However, when he learns something via some other learning method, like for example watching a video about it, or reading about it, he doesn't pay attention to the fact that he just learned something not by doing, but somehow else. He doesn't notice that fact, he doesn't pay attention to it, and thus he never realizes that he just contradicted his own notion of his preferred learning method. He never adds this event to the collection of contradictory evidence, because he never even notices that this is a counter-example.

Thus, he keeps believing that he's "a kinesthetic learner" because he simply inadvertently discards all the evidence of the contrary.

This misconception can actually be detrimental to one's learning and development. That's because it may potentially make oneself prejudiced against situations where a different form of learning is clearly taking place. It may make people think "I'm not good at this" and effectively shut themselves off, because they so strongly believe that they are incapable of doing it, that they can't learn in that manner. So in these situations it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's a bit like so many people who very strongly believe "I'm not good at math" and shut themselves off in any situation where any math calculations are needed, outright refusing to do it and stopping themselves from even trying, because they have ingrained the notion so strongly in their minds.

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