"It feels like it's in your body": How children in the United States think about nationality.

Concepts of national groups (e.g., Americans, Canadians) are an important source of identity and meaning in people's lives.

Memory accessibility shapes explanation: Testing key claims of the inherence heuristic account.

People understand the world by constructing explanations for what they observe. It is thus important to identify the cognitive processes underlying these judgments. According to a recent proposal, everyday explanations are often constructed heuristically: Because people need to generate explanations on a moment-by-moment basis, they cannot perform an exhaustive search through the space of possible reasons, but may instead use the information that is most easily accessible in memory (Cimpian & Salomon 2014a, b).

Investigating the origins of political views: biases in explanation predict conservative attitudes in children and adults.

We tested the hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by an information-processing factor - namely, a bias in the content of everyday explanations. Because many societal phenomena are enormously complex, people's understanding of them often relies on heuristic shortcuts. For instance, when generating explanations for such phenomena (e.

An early-emerging explanatory heuristic promotes support for the status quo.

People often view their sociopolitical systems as fair and natural despite indisputable biases in their structure. Current theories of this phenomenon trace its roots to a motivation to alleviate anxiety and uncertainty. Here, we propose a complementary cognitive pathway for these system-endorsing attitudes.