The inherence heuristic provides an intriguing and novel explanation for early thought in a variety of domains. Exploring similarities and differences in inherent reasoning across social and nonsocial domains can help us understand the role that inherent thinking plays in the development of human reasoning and the process by which more elaborate essentialist reasoning develops.
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Developmental evidence for a link between the inherence bias in explanation and psychological essentialism.
J Exp Child Psychol
January 2019
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.
The assumption that natural and social categories have deeper "essences" is a fundamental feature of the conceptual system, with wide-ranging consequences for behavior. What are the developmental origins of this assumption? We propose that essentialism emerges in part from a bias in the process of generating explanations that leads reasoners to overuse inherent or intrinsic features. Consistent with this proposal, the inherence bias in 4-year-olds' explanations predicted the strength of their essentialist beliefs (Study 1; N = 64), and manipulations of the inherence bias in 4- to 7-year-olds (Studies 2 and 3; N = 112 each) led to subsequent changes in the essentialist beliefs of children who attended to the manipulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMemory accessibility shapes explanation: Testing key claims of the inherence heuristic account.
Mem Cognit
January 2018
New York University, New York, NY, USA.
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).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInvestigating the origins of political views: biases in explanation predict conservative attitudes in children and adults.
Dev Sci
May 2018
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, USA.
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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe scope of formal explanation.
Psychon Bull Rev
October 2017
Department of Psychology, Hunter College, CUNY, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY, 10065, USA.
The existence of multiple modes of explanation means that a crucial step in the process of generating explanations has to be selecting a particular mode. The present article identifies the key conceptual, as well as some pragmatic and epistemological, considerations that license the use of the formal mode of explanation, and thus that enter into the process of selecting and generating a formal explanation. Formal explanations explain the presence of certain properties in an instance of a kind by reference to the kind of thing it is (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhy Do People Tend to Infer "Ought" From "Is"? The Role of Biases in Explanation.
Psychol Sci
August 2016
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Psychology, New York University.
People tend to judge what is typical as also good and appropriate-as what ought to be. What accounts for the prevalence of these judgments, given that their validity is at best uncertain? We hypothesized that the tendency to reason from "is" to "ought" is due in part to a systematic bias in people's (nonmoral) explanations, whereby regularities (e.g.
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