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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2014
Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) propose that the inherence heuristic, a tendency to explain the behavior and other properties of things in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, precedes and explains “essentialist thinking” about natural kinds. This commentary reviews evidence that it is rather essentialism (or something like it) that precedes the assumption of inherence, and suggests that essentialism can do without the inherence heuristic altogether.
Target article
The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism
Related commentaries (29)
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Do we need the inherence heuristic to explain the bias towards inherent explanations?
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Inherence heuristic versus essentialism: Issues of antecedence and cognitive mechanism
Inherence is an aspect of psychological essentialism
Inherence-based views of social categories
Is it about “pink” or about “girls”? The inherence heuristic across social and nonsocial domains
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Owning up to the role of historical information
Quiddity and haecceity as distinct forms of essentialism
System-justifying motives can lead to both the acceptance and the rejection of innate explanations for group differences
Systematic revisions to inherent notions may shape improvements in cognitive infrastructure
The causes of characteristic properties: Insides versus categories
The developmental and evolutionary origins of psychological essentialism lie in sortal object individuation
The essence of essentialism?
The inherence heuristic is inherent in humans
The inherence heuristic: A basis for psychological essentialism?
The inherence heuristic: A key theoretical addition to understanding social stereotyping and prejudice
The inherent bias in positing an inherence heuristic
The psychology of inherence is self-referential (and that is a good thing)
The representation of inherent properties
The social aetiology of essentialist beliefs
Why does the “mental shotgun” fire system-justifying bullets?
Why we assume it's all good: The role of theory of mind in early inherent feature inferences
Author response
Refining and expanding the proposal of an inherence heuristic in human understanding