Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:44:05.336Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2014

Andrei Cimpian  and
Erika Salomon
Andrei Cimpian
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL [email protected]://psychology.illinois.edu/people/acimpian
Erika Salomon
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL [email protected]://www.erikasalomon.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) predominantly in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is a delicate color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this article, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism – which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful essences – emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the report, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens's K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this article illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology.

Keywords

correspondence biasdevelopmentessentialismexplanationinherence heuristicis–ought problemnominal realismsystem justification
Type
Target Article
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , October 2014 , pp. 461 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahn, W., Kalish, C., Gelman, S. A., Medin, D., Luhmann, C., Atran, S., Coley, J. D. & Shafto, P. (2001) Why essences are essential in the psychology of concepts. Cognition 82:59–69. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00145-7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Anderson, C. A., Krull, D. S. & Weiner, B. (1996) Explanations: Processes and consequences. In: Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, ed. Higgins, E. T. & Kruglanski, A. W., pp. 271–96. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Atran, S. (1993) Cognitive foundations of natural history: Towards an anthropology of science. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Atran, S. (1998) Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:547–609.Google Scholar
Bargh, J. A. (1999) The cognitive monster: The case against controllability of automatic stereotype effects. In: Dual-process theories in social psychology, ed. Chaiken, S. & Trope, Y., pp. 361–82. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Bargh, J. A., Bond, R. N., Lombardi, W. J. & Tota, M. E. (1986) The additive nature of chronic and temporary sources of construct accessibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50:869–78.Google Scholar
Baron, A. & Banaji, M. (2009) Evidence of system justification in young children. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3:918–26.Google Scholar
Baron, J. (2005) Rationality and intelligence. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bastian, B. & Haslam, N. (2006) Psychological essentialism and stereotype endorsement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42:228–35. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2005.03.003.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (1996) Intention, history, and artifact concepts. Cognition 60:1–29.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (2000) How children learn the meanings of words. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bloom, P. (2004) Descartes' baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L. A. & Phillips, W. (2003) Sex, syntax, and semantics. In: Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought, ed. Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S., pp. 61–79. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brook, J. S. (1970) A test of Piaget's theory of “nominal realism.” Journal of Genetic Psychology 116:165–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E. & Kao, C. F. (1984) The efficient assessment of need for cognition. Journal of Personality Assessment 48:306–307.Google Scholar
Carey, S. (1996) Cognitive domains as modes of thought. In: Modes of thought: Explorations in culture and cognition, ed. Olson, D. R. & Torrance, N., pp. 187–215. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cattell, R. B. (1986) Intelligence: Its structure, growth, and action. Elsevier.Google Scholar
Chen, S. & Chaiken, S. (1999) The heuristic–systematic model in its broader context. In: Dual-process theories in social and cognitive psychology, ed. Chaiken, S. & Trope, Y., pp. 73–96. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. (2010) The impact of generic language about ability on children's achievement motivation. Developmental Psychology 46:1333–40.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. (2013) Generic statements, causal attributions, and children's naive theories. In: Navigating the social world: What infants, children, and other species can teach us, ed. Banaji, M. R. & Gelman, S. A., pp. 269–74. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A., Arce, H. C., Markman, E. M. & Dweck, C. S. (2007) Subtle linguistic cues affect children's motivation. Psychological Science 18:314–16.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. & Cadena, C. (2010) Why are dunkels sticky? Preschoolers infer functionality and intentional creation for artifact properties learned from generic language. Cognition 117:62–68.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. & Erickson, L. C. (2012) The effect of generic statements on children's causal attributions: Questions of mechanism. Developmental Psychology 48:159–70.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. & Markman, E. M. (2009) Information learned from generic language becomes central to children's biological concepts: Evidence from their open-ended explanations. Cognition 113:14–25.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. & Markman, E. M. (2011) The generic/nongeneric distinction influences how children interpret new information about social others. Child Development 82:471–92.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A., Mu, Y. & Erickson, L. C. (2012) Who is good at this game? Linking an activity to a social category undermines children's achievement. Psychological Science 23:533–41.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. & Scott, R. M. (2012) Children expect generic knowledge to be widely shared. Cognition 123:419–33.Google Scholar
Cimpian, A. & Steinberg, O. D. (in press) The inherence heuristic across development: Systematic differences between children's and adults' explanations for everyday facts. Cognitive Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2014.09.001 Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1988) On the logic of contrast. Journal of Child Language 15:317–35.Google Scholar
Dar-Nimrod, I. & Heine, S. J. (2011) Genetic essentialism: On the deceptive determinism of DNA. Psychological Bulletin 137:800–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Neys, W. (2006) Dual processing in reasoning: Two systems but one reasoner. Psychological Science 17:428–33.Google Scholar
Devine, P. G. (1989) Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56:5–18.Google Scholar
Diesendruck, G. & Markson, L. (2001) Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account. Developmental Psychology 37:630–41.Google Scholar
Diesendruck, G. & Markson, L. (2011) Children's assumption of the conventionality of culture. Child Development Perspectives 5:189–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DiVitto, B. & McArthur, L. Z. (1978) Developmental differences in the use of distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency information for making causal attributions. Developmental Psychology 14:474–82.Google Scholar
Dupré, J. (1981) Natural kinds and biological taxa. Philosophical Review 90:66–90.Google Scholar
Dweck, C. S. (1999) Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Dweck, C. S. (2006) Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.Google Scholar
Eidelman, S., Crandall, C. S. & Pattershall, J. (2009) The existence bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97:765–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2003) In two minds: Dual-process accounts of reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7:454–59.Google Scholar
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2006) The heuristic-analytic theory of reasoning: Extension and evaluation. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 13:378–95.Google Scholar
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2008) Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59:255–78.Google Scholar
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2009) How many dual process theories do we need: One, two or many? In: In two minds: Dual processes and beyond, ed. Evans, J. St. B. T. & Frankish, K., pp. 1–32. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fiske, S. T. & Taylor, S. E. (1984) Social cognition. Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Frazer, J. G. (1890/1958) The golden bough: A study in magic and religion. Macmillan. (Original work published in 1890.)Google Scholar
Frederick, S. (2002) Automated choice heuristics. In: Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment, ed. Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. & Kahneman, D., pp. 548–58. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Friedrich, J. (2005) Naturalistic fallacy errors in lay interpretations of psychological science: Data and reflections on the Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman (1998) controversy. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 27:59–70.Google Scholar
Friedrich, J. (2010) Naturalistic fallacy errors and behavioral science news: The effects of editorial content and cautions on readers' moral inferences and perceptions of contributors. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 32:369–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedrich, J., Kierniesky, N. & Cardon, L. (1989) Drawing moral inferences from descriptive science: The impact of attitudes on naturalistic fallacy errors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15:414–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gabennesch, H. (1990) The perception of social conventionality by children and adults. Child Development 61:2047–59.Google Scholar
Gawronski, B. (2004) Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead, long live the correspondence bias. European Review of Social Psychology 15:183–217.Google Scholar
Gelman, R. (1990) First principles organize attention to and learning about relevant data: Number and the animate–inanimate distinction as examples. Cognitive Science 14:79–106.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. (2003) The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Bloom, P. (2000) Young children are sensitive to how an object was created when deciding what to name it. Cognition 76:91–103.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A., Coley, J. D., Rosengren, K. S., Hartman, E. & Pappas, A. (1998) Beyond labeling: The role of parental input in the acquisition of richly structured categories. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 63(1, whole no. 253).Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Gottfried, G. M. (1996) Children's causal explanations of animate and inanimate motion. Child Development 67:1970–87.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Kalish, C. W. (1993) Categories and causality. In: Emerging themes in cognitive development, vol. 2, ed. Pasnak, R. & Howe, M. L., pp. 3–32. Springer.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Markman, E. M. (1986) Categories and induction in young children. Cognition 23:183–209.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A., Taylor, M. G. & Nguyen, S. P. (2004) Mother–child conversations about gender: Understanding the acquisition of essentialist beliefs. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 69(1, Whole No. 275).Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A., Ware, E. A. & Kleinberg, F. (2010) Effects of generic language on category content and structure. Cognitive Psychology 61:273–301.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Wellman, H. M. (1991) Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition 38:213–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gilbert, D. T. & Malone, P. S. (1995) The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin 117:21–38.Google Scholar
Gilbert, D. T., Pelham, B. W. & Krull, D. S. (1988) On cognitive busyness: When person perceivers meet persons perceived. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54:733–40.Google Scholar
Gilovich, T. & Griffin, D. (2002) Introduction – Heuristics and biases: Then and now. In: Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment, ed. Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. & Kahneman, D., pp. 1–18. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. & Kahneman, D. (2002) Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gil-White, F. (2001) Are ethnic groups biological “species” to the human brain? Current Anthropology 42:515–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, A. (1998) Explanation as orgasm. Minds and Machines 8:101–18.Google Scholar
Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D. M., Schulz, L. E., Kushnir, T. & Danks, D. (2004) A theory of causal learning in children: Causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychological Review 111:3–32.Google Scholar
Gottfried, G. M. & Gelman, S. A. (2005) Developing domain-specific causal-explanatory frameworks: The role of insides and immanence. Cognitive Development 20:137–58.Google Scholar
Graham, S. A., Stock, H. & Henderson, A. M. (2006) Nineteen-month-olds' understanding of the conventionality of object labels versus desires. Infancy 9:341–50.Google Scholar
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E. & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998) Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74:1464–80.Google Scholar
Gweon, H. & Schulz, L. E. (2011) 16-month-olds rationally infer causes of failed actions. Science 332:1524.Google Scholar
Haslam, N., Rothschild, L. & Ernst, D. (2000) Essentialist beliefs about social categories. British Journal of Social Psychology 39:113–27. doi:10.1348/014466600164363.Google Scholar
Haslam, N., Rothschild, L. & Ernst, D. (2002) Are essentialist beliefs associated with prejudice? British Journal of Social Psychology 41:87–100. doi:10.1348/014466602165072.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haslam, N. & Whelan, J. (2008) Human natures: Psychological essentialism in thinking about differences between people. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2:1297–312.Google Scholar
Hatano, G. & Inagaki, K. (1994) Young children's naive theory of biology. Cognition 50:171–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Helwig, C. C., Tisak, M. S. & Turiel, E. (1990) Children's social reasoning in context: Reply to Gabennesch. Child Development 61:2068–78.Google Scholar
Helwig, C. C. & Turiel, E. (2011) Children's social and moral reasoning. In: Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood social development, 2nd edition, ed. Hart, C. & Smith, P., pp. 567–83. Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Higgins, E. T. (1996) Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience. In: Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, ed. Higgins, E. T. & Kruglanski, A. W., pp. 133–68. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Higgins, E. T. & Bryant, S. L. (1982) Consensus information and fundamental attribution error: The role of development and in-group versus out-group knowledge. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43:889–900.Google Scholar
Higgins, E. T. & King, G. (1981) Accessibility of social constructs: Information processing consequences of individual and contextual variability. In: Personality, cognition, and social interaction, ed. Cantor, N. & Kihlstrom, J. F., pp. 69–121. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Higgins, E. T., King, G. A. & Mavin, G. H. (1982) Individual construct accessibility and subjective impressions and recall. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 43:35–47.Google Scholar
Higgins, E. T., Rholes, W. S. & Jones, C. R. (1977) Category accessibility and impression formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13:141–54.Google Scholar
Hoffman, C. & Hurst, N. (1990) Gender stereotypes: Perception or rationalization? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58:197–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hood, B. M. & Bloom, P. (2008) Children prefer certain individuals over perfect duplicates. Cognition 106:455–62.Google Scholar
Hooper, E. M. (1890) Hints on home dress-making. The Ladies' Home Journal 7(12):23.Google Scholar
Horton, R. (1967) African traditional thought and Western science: Part II. The “closed” and “open” predicaments. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 37:155–87.Google Scholar
Hume, D. (1740/2000) A treatise of human nature, ed. Norton, D. F. & Norton, M. J.. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1740.)Google Scholar
Hurlbert, A. & Ling, Y. (2007) Biological components of sex differences in color preference. Current Biology 17:R623–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, E. E. & Davis, K. E. (1965) From acts to dispositions: The attribution process in social psychology. In: Advances in experimental social psychology, vol. 2, ed. Berkowitz, L., pp. 219–66. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Jones, E. E. & Harris, V. A. (1967) The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3:1–24.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T. (2001) Outgroup favoritism and the theory of system justification: A paradigm for investigating the effects of socioeconomic success on stereotype content. In: Cognitive social psychology: The Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition, ed. Moskowitz, G., pp. 89–102. Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T. & Banaji, M. R. (1994) The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology 33:1–27.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T. Banaji, M. R. & Nosek, B. A. (2004) A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology 25:881–919.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T. & Burgess, D. (2000) Attitudinal ambivalence and the conflict between group and system justification motives in low status groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26:293–305.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanksi, A. W. & Sulloway, F. (2003) Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin 129:339–75.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T. & Hunyady, O. (2005) Antecedents and consequences of system-justifying ideologies. Current Directions in Psychological Science 14:260–65.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Frederick, S. (2002) Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In: Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment, ed. Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. & Kahneman, D., pp. 49–81. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1973) On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review 80:237–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kail, R. (1991) Developmental change in speed of processing during childhood and adolescence. Psychological Bulletin 109:490–501.Google Scholar
Kalish, C. W. (1998) Reasons and causes: Children's understanding of conformity to social rules and physical laws. Child Development 69:706–20.Google Scholar
Kalish, C. W. & Lawson, C. A. (2008) Development of social category representations: Early appreciation of roles and deontic relations. Child Development 79:577–93.Google Scholar
Kamins, M. L. & Dweck, C. S. (1999) Person versus process praise and criticism: Implications for contingent self-worth and coping. Developmental Psychology 35:835–47.Google Scholar
Kane, M. J. & Engle, R. W. (2002) The role of prefrontal cortex in working-memory capacity, executive attention, and general fluid intelligence: An individual-differences perspective. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9:637–71.Google Scholar
Kay, A. C. & Friesen, J. (2011) On social stability and social change: Understanding when system justification does and does not occur. Current Directions in Psychological Science 20:360–64.Google Scholar
Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., Peach, J. M., Laurin, K., Friesen, J., Zanna, M. P. & Spencer, S. J. (2009) Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97:421–34.Google Scholar
Keller, J. (2005) In genes we trust: The biological component of psychological essentialism and its relationship to mechanisms of motivated social cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88:686–702. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.88.4.686.Google Scholar
Kelley, H. H. (1967) Attribution theory in social psychology. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 15:192–238.Google Scholar
Kelley, H. H. (1973) The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist 28:107–28.Google Scholar
Kelley, H. H. & Michela, J. L. (1980) Attribution theory and research. Annual Review of Psychology 31:457–501.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keysar, B. & Bly, B. M. (1995) Intuitions of the transparency of idioms: Can one keep a secret by spilling the beans? Journal of Memory and Language 34:89–109.Google Scholar
Keysar, B. & Bly, B. M. (1999) Swimming against the current: Do idioms reflect conceptual structure? Journal of Pragmatics 31:1559–78.Google Scholar
Kokis, J. V., Macpherson, R., Toplak, M. E., West, R. F. & Stanovich, K. E. (2002) Heuristic and analytic processing: Age trends and associations with cognitive ability and cognitive styles. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 83:26–52.Google Scholar
Kornblith, H. (1995) Inductive inference and its natural ground: An essay in naturalistic epistemology. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kruglanski, A. W. (1996) Motivated social cognition: Principles of the interface. In: Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles, ed. Higgins, E. T. & Kruglanski, A. W., pp. 493–520. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Kruglanski, A. W., Webster, D. W. & Klem, A. (1993) Motivated resistance and openness to persuasion in the presence or absence of prior information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65:861–76.Google Scholar
Krull, D. S. (1993) Does the grist change the mill? The effect of the perceiver's inferential goal on the process of social inference. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19:340–48.Google Scholar
Krull, D. S., Loy, M. H. M., Lin, J., Wang, C. F., Chen, S. & Zhao, X. (1999) The fundamental fundamental attribution error: Correspondence bias in individualist and collectivist cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25:1208–19.Google Scholar
Laszlo, P. (2007) Citrus: A history. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lerner, M. J. (1980) The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. Plenum Google Scholar
Leslie, S. J. (2013) Essence and natural kinds: When science meets preschooler intuition. In: Oxford studies in epistemology, vol. 4, ed. Gendler, T. & Hawthorne, J., pp. 108–66. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Levy, S. R., Stroessner, S. J. & Dweck, C. S. (1998) Stereotype formation and endorsement: The role of implicit theories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74:1421–36. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1421.Google Scholar
Lipton, P. (2004) Inference to the best explanation, 2nd edition. Routledge.Google Scholar
Liviatan, I. & Jost, J. T. (2011) Motivated social cognition in the service of the status quo. Special issue: System justification theory. Social Cognition 29:231–37.Google Scholar
LoBue, V. & DeLoache, J. S. (2011) Pretty in pink: The early development of gender-stereotyped colour preferences. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 29:656–67.Google Scholar
Lockhart, K. L., Abrahams, B. & Osherson, D. N. (1977) Children's understanding of uniformity in the environment. Child Development 48:1521–31.Google Scholar
Lohman, D. F. (1989) Human intelligence: An introduction to advances in theory and research. Review of Educational Research 59:333–73.Google Scholar
Luo, Y., Kaufman, L. & Baillargeon, R. (2009) Young infants' reasoning about physical events involving inert and self-propelled objects. Cognitive Psychology 58:441–86.Google Scholar
Maglo, K. N. (2011) The case against biological realism about race: From Darwin to the post-genomic era. Perspectives on Science 19:361–90.Google Scholar
Markman, E. M. (1989) Categorization and naming in children: Problems of induction. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Matthews, M., Levin, S. & Sidanius, J. (2009) A longitudinal test of the model of political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Political Psychology 30:921–36.Google Scholar
Maurer, D., Pathman, T. & Mondloch, C. J. (2006) The shape of boubas: Sound–shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental Science 9:316–22.Google Scholar
McArthur, L. A. (1972) The how and what of why: Some determinants and consequences of causal attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 22:171–93.Google Scholar
McRae, K., De Sa, V. R. & Seidenberg, M. S. (1997) On the nature and scope of featural representations of word meaning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 126:99–130.Google Scholar
McRae, K. & Jones, M. N. (2013) Semantic memory. In: The Oxford handbook of cognitive psychology, ed. Reisberg, D.. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Medin, D. L. & Ortony, A. (1989) Psychological essentialism. In: Similarity and analogical reasoning, ed. Vosniadou, S. & Ortony, A., pp. 179–95. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Meyer, M., Leslie, S.-J., Gelman, S. A. & Stilwell, S. M. (2013) Essentialist beliefs about bodily transplants in the United States and India. Cognitive Science 37:668–710.Google Scholar
Morris, M. & Peng, K. (1994) Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67:949–71.Google Scholar
Morris, S. C., Taplin, J. E. & Gelman, S. A. (2000) Vitalism in naive biological thinking. Developmental Psychology 36:582–95.Google Scholar
Mueller, C. M. & Dweck, C. S. (1998) Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75:33–52.Google Scholar
Murdock, G. P., Wilson, S. F. & Frederick, V. (1978) World distribution of theories of illness. Ethnology 17:449–70.Google Scholar
Murphy, G. L. (2004) The big book of concepts. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, G. L. & Medin, D. L. (1985) The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92:289–316.Google Scholar
Napier, J. L., Mandisodza, A. N., Andersen, S. M. & Jost, J. T. (2006) System justification in responding to the poor and displaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 6:57–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Needham, P. (2000) What is water? Analysis 60:13–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Needham, P. (2011) Microessentialism: What is the argument? Noûs 45:1–21.Google Scholar
Newman, G. E., Herrmann, P., Wynn, K. & Keil, F. C. (2008) Biases towards internal features in infants' reasoning about objects. Cognition 107(2):420–32.Google Scholar
Newman, G. E. & Keil, F. C. (2008) Where is the essence? Developmental shifts in children's beliefs about internal features. Child Development 79(5):1344–56.Google Scholar
Nickerson, R. S. (1998) Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology 2:175–220.Google Scholar
Orvis, B. R., Cunningham, J. D. & Kelley, H. H. (1975) A closer examination of causal inference: The roles of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32:605–16.Google Scholar
Osherson, D. N. & Markman, E. M. (1975) Language and the ability to evaluate contradictions and tautologies. Cognition 3:213–26.Google Scholar
Paoletti, J. B. (2012) Pink and blue: Telling the boys from the girls in America. Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Piaget, J. (1929/1967) The child's conception of the world, trans. Tomlinson, J. & Tomlinson, A.. Littlefield, Adams & Co. (Original work published 1929.)Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1994) The language instinct: How the mind creates language. William Morrow.Google Scholar
Prasada, S. & Dillingham, E. (2006) Principled and statistical connections in common sense conception. Cognition 99:73–112.Google Scholar
Prasada, S. & Dillingham, E. (2009) Representation of principled connections: A window onto the formal aspect of common sense conception. Cognitive Science 33:401–48.Google Scholar
Premack, D. & Premack, A. J. (1996) Origins of human social competence. In: The cognitive neurosciences, ed. Gazzaniga, M. S., pp. 205–18. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Prentice, D. A. & Miller, D. T. (2007) Psychological essentialism of human categories. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16:202–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pyszczynski, T. & Greenberg, J. (1987) Toward an integration of cognitive and motivational perspectives on social inference: A biased-hypothesis testing model. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 20:297–340.Google Scholar
Ramachandran, V. S. & Hubbard, E. M. (2001) Synaesthesia – A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8:3–34.Google Scholar
Raven, J. C. (1960) Guide to the standard progressive matrices: Sets A, B, C, D and E. H. K. Lewis & Co.Google Scholar
Rhodes, M. & Gelman, S. A. (2009) A developmental examination of the conceptual structure of animal, artifact, and human social categories across two cultural contexts. Cognitive Psychology 59:244–74.Google Scholar
Rhodes, M., Leslie, S. J. & Tworek, C. M. (2012) Cultural transmission of social essentialism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 109:13526–31.Google Scholar
Rosch, E. & Mervis, C. B. (1975) Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7:573–605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenblum, T. & Pinker, S. A. (1983) Word magic revisited: Monolingual and bilingual children's understanding of the word-object relationship. Child Development 54:773–80.Google Scholar
Ross, L. D. (1977) The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10:173–220.Google Scholar
Ross, L. D., Amabile, T. M. & Steinmetz, J. L. (1977) Social roles, social control, and biases in social-perception processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35:485–94.Google Scholar
Rozin, P., Markwith, M. & Ross, B. (1990) The sympathetic magical law of similarity, nominal realism and neglect of negatives in response to negative labels. Psychological Science 1:383–84.Google Scholar
Rozin, P., Millman, L. & Nemeroff, C. (1986) Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50:703–12.Google Scholar
Ruble, D. N., Feldman, N. S., Higgins, E. T. & Karlovac, M. (1979) Locus of causality and the use of information in the development of causal attributions. Journal of Personality 47:595–614.Google Scholar
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N. & Newport, E. L. (1996) Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274:1926–28.Google Scholar
Salomon, E., & Cimpian, A. (2014). The inherence heuristic as a source of essentialist thought. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40:1297–315.Google Scholar
Samuelson, W. & Zeckhauser, R. (1988) Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1:7–59.Google Scholar
Saxe, R., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Carey, S. (2005) Secret agents: Inferences about hidden causes by 10- and 12-month-old infants. Psychological Science 16:995–1001.Google Scholar
Schulz, L. E. (2012) The origins of inquiry: Inductive inference and exploration in early childhood. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16:382–89.Google Scholar
Schwarz, N. & Clore, G. L. (1983) Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45:513–23.Google Scholar
Scribner, S. & Cole, M. (1981) The psychology of literacy. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Seiver, E., Gopnik, A. & Goodman, N. D. (2013) Did she jump because she was the big sister or because the trampoline was safe? Causal inference and the development of social attribution. Child Development 8:443–54.Google Scholar
Shweder, R. A., Mahapatra, M. & Miller, J. G. (1987) Culture and moral development. In: The emergence of morality in young children, ed. Kagan, J. & Lamb, S., pp. 1–82. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Simons, D. J. & Keil, F. C. (1995) An abstract to concrete shift in the development of biological thought: The insides story. Cognition 56:129–63.Google Scholar
Sloman, S. A. (1996) The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 119:3–22.Google Scholar
Smetana, J. G., Schlagman, N. & Adams, P. W. (1993) Preschool children's judgments about hypothetical and actual transgressions. Child Development 64:202–14.Google Scholar
Snyder, M. & Swann, W. B. (1978) Hypothesis-testing processes in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36:1202–12.Google Scholar
Sober, E. (1994) From a biological point of view: Essays in evolutionary philosophy. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. (1999) Who is rational? Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. (2011) Rationality and the reflective mind. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. & West, R. F. (1997) Reasoning independently of prior belief and individual differences in actively open-minded thinking. Journal of Educational Psychology 89:342–57.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E. & West, R. F. (2000) Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23:645–65.Google Scholar
Strevens, M. (2000) The essentialist aspect of naive theories. Cognition 74:149–75.Google Scholar
Strevens, M. (2001) Only causation matters: Reply to Ahn et al. Cognition 82:71–76.Google Scholar
Sutherland, S. L. & Cimpian, A. (in preparation) An inherence heuristic in explanation promotes the belief that words are well suited for their referents.Google Scholar
Tambiah, S. J. (1968) The magical power of words. Man 3:175–208.Google Scholar
Trope, Y. & Gaunt, R. (1999) A dual-process model of overconfident attributional inferences, In: Dual-process theories in social psychology, ed. Chaiken, S. & Trope, Y., pp. 161–78. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Trope, Y. & Gaunt, R. (2000) Processing alternative explanations of behavior: Correction or integration? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79:344–54.Google Scholar
Trope, Y. & Gaunt, R. (2007) Attribution and person perception. In: The Sage handbook of social psychology, ed. Hogg, M. A. & Cooper, J., pp. 176–94. Sage.Google Scholar
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1983) Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review 90:293–315.Google Scholar
Unger, R. M. (1983) The critical legal studies movement. Harvard Law Review 96:561–675.Google Scholar
Wason, P. C. (1960) On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12:129–40.Google Scholar
Weiner, B. (1985) “Spontaneous” causal thinking. Psychological Bulletin 97:74–84.Google Scholar
Welder, A. N. & Graham, S. A. (2006) Infants' categorization of novel objects with more or less obvious features. Cognitive Psychology 52:57–91.Google Scholar
Williams, B. R., Ponesse, J. S., Schachar, R. J., Logan, G. D. & Tannock, R. (1999) Development of inhibitory control across the life span. Developmental Psychology 35:205–13.Google Scholar
Williams, M. J. & Eberhardt, J. L. (2008) Biological conceptions of race and the motivation to cross racial boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84:1033–47. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.94.6.1033.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. S., Dietrich, E. & Clark, A. B. (2003) On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology. Biology and Philosophy 18:669–81.Google Scholar
Yzerbyt, V. Y., Corneille, O. & Estrada, C. (2001) The interplay of subjective essentialism and entitativity in the formation of stereotypes. Personality and Social Psychology Review 5:141–55.Google Scholar
Zhao, J., Al-Aidroos, N. & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2013) Attention is spontaneously biased toward regularities. Psychological Science 24:667–77.Google Scholar