addendum: they believe things which are almost correct or apparently correct. Heavier objects fall faster is not correct, but it is apparently correct because very light objects fall slower than heavy objects, and this appears to be constant unless you actually check and realize there's a threshold. There's no world outside of eurasia and africa is functionally true if you lack the nautical equipment to reach the americas, but factually wrong. You can't get things too wrong without problems, but there's a decent amount of leeway.
It's a heuristic thing. Denser objects are often* heavier, but it's the density and not the weight that may make them fall faster (not accounting for how aerodynamic a given object is). It can produce incorrect judgements, especially if they attempt to articulate their intuitive knowledge as some precise-yet-abstract law, but in practical circumstances their intuitive knowledge produces the expected result the vast majority of the time, so pragmatically it's reasonable to call it correct.
*Certainly their weight is more noticeable, as is the lack of weight of less-dense objects, so perhaps this is the real source of the skew, a type of selection bias.
addendum: they believe things which are almost correct or apparently correct. Heavier objects fall faster is not correct, but it is apparently correct because very light objects fall slower than heavy objects, and this appears to be constant unless you actually check and realize there's a threshold. There's no world outside of eurasia and africa is functionally true if you lack the nautical equipment to reach the americas, but factually wrong. You can't get things too wrong without problems, but there's a decent amount of leeway.
It's a heuristic thing. Denser objects are often* heavier, but it's the density and not the weight that may make them fall faster (not accounting for how aerodynamic a given object is). It can produce incorrect judgements, especially if they attempt to articulate their intuitive knowledge as some precise-yet-abstract law, but in practical circumstances their intuitive knowledge produces the expected result the vast majority of the time, so pragmatically it's reasonable to call it correct.
*Certainly their weight is more noticeable, as is the lack of weight of less-dense objects, so perhaps this is the real source of the skew, a type of selection bias.