TY - GEN
T1 - Structural Thinking about Social Categories
T2 - 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
AU - Vasilyeva, Nadya
AU - Lombrozo, Tania
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019.All rights reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Most theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors believed to underlie kind membership and the observable properties of members. Across two studies (N = 234), we show that adults can construe properties of social kinds as products of both internal and structural (stable external) factors. Internalist and structural construals are similar in that both support formal explanations (i.e., “category member has property P due to category membership C”), generic claims (“Cs have P”), and a particular pattern of generalization to individuals when the individuals' category membership and structural position are preserved. Our findings thus challenge these phenomena as signatures of essentialist thinking. However, once category membership and structural position are unconfounded, different patterns of generalization emerge across internalist and structural construals, as do different judgments concerning category definitions and property mutability. These findings have important implications for reasoning about social kinds.
AB - Most theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors believed to underlie kind membership and the observable properties of members. Across two studies (N = 234), we show that adults can construe properties of social kinds as products of both internal and structural (stable external) factors. Internalist and structural construals are similar in that both support formal explanations (i.e., “category member has property P due to category membership C”), generic claims (“Cs have P”), and a particular pattern of generalization to individuals when the individuals' category membership and structural position are preserved. Our findings thus challenge these phenomena as signatures of essentialist thinking. However, once category membership and structural position are unconfounded, different patterns of generalization emerge across internalist and structural construals, as do different judgments concerning category definitions and property mutability. These findings have important implications for reasoning about social kinds.
KW - essentialism
KW - generalization
KW - inherence
KW - kind representation
KW - social categorization
KW - structural explanation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85120847949&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85120847949
T3 - Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
SP - 1164
EP - 1170
BT - Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
Y2 - 24 July 2019 through 27 July 2019
ER -