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5The inherence heuristic: a basis for psychological essentialism?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 490-490. 2014.Cimpian & Salomon provide evidence that psychological essentialism rests on a domain-general attention to inherent causes. We suggest that the inherence heuristic may itself be undergirded by a more foundational cognitive bias, namely, a realist assumption about environmental regularities. In contrast, when considering specific representations, people may be more likely to activate attention to non-inherent, contingent, and historical links.
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45A cross-linguistic comparison of generic noun phrases in English and MandarinCognition 66 (3): 215-248. 1998.Generic noun phrases (e.g. 'bats live in caves') provide a window onto human concepts. They refer to categories as 'kinds rather than as sets of individuals. Although kind concepts are often assumed to be universal, generic expression varies considerably across languages. For example, marking of generics is less obligatory and overt in Mandarin than in English. How do universal conceptual biases interact with language-specific differences in how generics are conveyed? In three studies, we examin…Read more
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62The role of covariation versus mechanism information in causal attributionCognition 54 (3): 299-352. 1995.
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64So It Is, So It Shall Be: Group Regularities License Children's Prescriptive JudgmentsCognitive Science 41 (S3): 576-600. 2017.When do descriptive regularities become prescriptive norms? We examined children's and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups that engaged in morally neutral behaviors. Participants were introduced to conforming or non-conforming individuals. Children negatively evaluated non-conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age. These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts and stemmed from reasoning abo…Read more
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Children's Use of Sample Size and Diversity Information within Basic-Level CategoriesJournal of Experimental Child Psychology 64 159-174. 1997.
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63How biological is essentialismIn Douglas L. Medin & Scott Atran (eds.), Folkbiology, Mit Press. pp. 403--446. 1999.
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107Do Lions have Manes? For Children, Generics are about Kinds, not QuantitiesChild Development 83 423-433. 2012.
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24The Importance of Clarifying Evolutionary Terminology Across Disciplines and in the Classroom: A Reply to KampourakisCognitive Science 39 (4): 838-841. 2015.
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25Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co-Existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across DevelopmentCognitive Science 32 (4): 607-642. 2008.Three studies examined the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5-, 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho-speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were both available. Results indicated that, although biological explanations for illness were endorsed at high levels, witchcraft was also often endorsed. …Read more
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35Two insights about naming in the preschool childIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 198--215. 2005.This chapter examines associationist models of cognitive development, focusing on the development of naming in young children — the process by which young children learn of construct the meanings of words and concepts. It presents two early-emerging insights that children possess about the nature of naming. These insights are: essentialism: certain words map onto nonobvious, underlying causal features, and genericity: certain expressions map onto generic kinds as opposed to particular instances.…Read more
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78Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to CategoriesCognitive Science 39 (5): 1021-1046. 2015.Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which ca…Read more
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21Preschoolers’ use of spatiotemporal history, appearance, and proper name in determining individual identityCognition 107 (1): 366-380. 2008.
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142Generic Statements Require Little Evidence for Acceptance but Have Powerful ImplicationsCognitive Science 34 (8): 1452-1482. 2010.Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel gene…Read more
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26You Get What You Need: An Examination of Purpose‐Based Inheritance Reasoning in Undergraduates, Preschoolers, and Biological ExpertsCognitive Science 38 (2): 197-243. 2014.This set of seven experiments examines reasoning about the inheritance and acquisition of physical properties in preschoolers, undergraduates, and biology experts. Participants (N = 390) received adoption vignettes in which a baby animal was born to one parent but raised by a biologically unrelated parent, and they judged whether the offspring would have the same property as the birth or rearing parent. For each vignette, the animal parents had contrasting values on a physical property dimension…Read more
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82Quantified Statements are Recalled as Generics: Evidence from Preschool Children and AdultsCognitive Psychology 64 (186): 214. 2012.
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61Tracking the Actions and Possessions of AgentsTopics in Cognitive Science 6 (4): 599-614. 2014.We propose that there is a powerful human disposition to track the actions and possessions of agents. In two experiments, 3-year-olds and adults viewed sets of objects, learned a new fact about one of the objects in each set , and were queried about either the taught fact or an unrelated dimension immediately after a spatiotemporal transformation, and after a delay. Adults uniformly tracked object identity under all conditions, whereas children tracked identity more when taught ownership versus …Read more
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54Children's Developing Intuitions About the Truth Conditions and Implications of Novel Generics Versus Quantified StatementsCognitive Science 39 (4): 711-738. 2015.Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by all, most, and some. Results reveal that, like adults, preschoolers recognize that generics have flexible truth conditions and are capable of representing a wide range of prevalence levels; and…Read more
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671Differences in the Evaluation of Generic Statements About Human and Non‐Human CategoriesCognitive Science 41 (7): 1934-1957. 2017.Generic statements express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening property for artifacts, but this negativity bias di…Read more
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45Psychological models often assume that young children learn words and concepts bymeansof associative learning mechanisms, without the need to posit any innate predispositions. For example, Smith, Jones, and Landau (1996) propose that children learn concepts by hearing specific linguistic frames while viewing specific object properties. The environment provides all the information that children need; the conjunction of sights and sounds is proposed to be sufficient to enable children (review)In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 1--198. 2005.
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124Artifacts and EssentialismReview of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3): 449-463. 2013.Psychological essentialism is an intuitive folk belief positing that certain categories have a non-obvious inner “essence” that gives rise to observable features. Although this belief most commonly characterizes natural kind categories, I argue that psychological essentialism can also be extended in important ways to artifact concepts. Specifically, concepts of individual artifacts include the non-obvious feature of object history, which is evident when making judgments regarding authenticity an…Read more
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37My Heart Made Me Do It: Children's Essentialist Beliefs About Heart TransplantsCognitive Science 41 (6): 1694-1712. 2017.Psychological essentialism is a folk theory characterized by the belief that a causal internal essence or force gives rise to the common outward behaviors or attributes of a category's members. In two studies, we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-old children evidenced essentialist reasoning about heart transplants by asking them to predict whether trading hearts with an individual would cause them to take on the donor's attributes. Control conditions asked children to consider the effects of tr…Read more
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32History and essence in human cognitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2): 142-143. 2013.Bullot & Reber (B&R) provide compelling evidence that sensitivity to context, history, and design stance are crucial to theories of art appreciation. We ask how these ideas relate to broader aspects of human cognition. Further open questions concern how psychological essentialism contributes to art appreciation and how essentialism regarding created artifacts (such as art) differs from essentialism in other domains.
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University of Michigan, Ann ArborRegular Faculty
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America