Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-16T23:28:13.571Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Refining and expanding the proposal of an inherence heuristic in human understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Andrei Cimpian  and
Erika Salomon
Andrei Cimpian
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820. acimpian@psych.illinois.eduhttp://psychology.illinois.edu/people/acimpiansalomon3@illinois.eduhttp://www.erikasalomon.com
Erika Salomon
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820. acimpian@psych.illinois.eduhttp://psychology.illinois.edu/people/acimpiansalomon3@illinois.eduhttp://www.erikasalomon.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The inherence heuristic is a cognitive process that supplies quick and effortless explanations for a wide variety of observations. Due in part to biases in memory retrieval, this heuristic tends to overproduce explanations that appeal to the inherent features of the entities in the observations being explained (hence the heuristic's name). In this response, we use the commentators' input to clarify, refine, and expand the inherence heuristic model. The end result is a piece that complements the target article, amplifying its theoretical contribution.

Type
Author's Response
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , October 2014 , pp. 506 - 527
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

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
Baillargeon, R. (1994) Physical reasoning in young infants: Seeking explanations for impossible events. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 12:9–33.Google Scholar
Baillargeon, R. (2004) Infants' physical world. Current Directions in Psychological Science 13:89–94.Google Scholar
Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M. & He, Z. (2010) False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14:110–18.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Klein, R. & Viswanathan, M. (2004) Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon task. Psychology and Aging 19:290–303.Google Scholar
Bigler, R. S., Arthur, A. E., Hughes, J. M. & Patterson, M. M. (2008) The politics of race and gender: Children's perceptions of discrimination and the U.S. presidency. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 8:1–30.Google Scholar
Bigler, R. S. & Liben, L. S. (2006) A developmental intergroup theory of social stereotypes and prejudice. Advances in Child Development and Behavior 34:39–89.Google Scholar
Bigler, R. S. & Liben, L. S. (2007) Developmental intergroup theory: Explaining and reducing children's social stereotyping and prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16:162–71.Google Scholar
Bigler, R. S. & Wright, Y. F. (2014) Reading, writing, arithmetic, and racism? Risks and benefits to teaching children about intergroup biases. Child Development Perspectives 8:18–23.Google Scholar
Boyd, R. N. (1988) How to be a moral realist. In: Essays on moral realism, ed. Sayre-McCord, G., pp. 181–228. Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Brook, J. S. (1970) A test of Piaget's theory of “nominal realism.” Journal of Genetic Psychology 116:165–75.Google Scholar
Callanan, M. A. & Oakes, L. M. (1992) Preschoolers' questions and parents' explanations: Causal thinking in everyday activity. Cognitive Development 7:213–33.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1959) A review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior . Language 35:26–58.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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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. & Petro, G. (2014) Building theory-based concepts: Four-year-olds preferentially seek explanations for features of kinds. Cognition 131:300–10.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
Devine, P. G. (1989) Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56:5–18.Google Scholar
Epley, N. & Gilovich, T. (2006) The anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic: Why the adjustments are insufficient. Psychologic8al Science 17:311–18.Google Scholar
Evans, J. St. B. T. & Stanovich, K. E. (2013) Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science 8:223–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fodor, J. A. (1983) The modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gabennesch, H. (1990) The perception of social conventionality by children and adults. Child Development 61:2047–59.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. (2013) Artifacts and essentialism. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4:449–63.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).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Kremer, K. (1991) Understanding natural cause: Children's explanations of how objects and their properties originate. Child Development 62:396–414.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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gigerenzer, G. (1996) On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky (1996). Psychological Review 103:592–96.Google Scholar
Gilbert, D. T. (2002) Inferential correction. In: Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment, ed. Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. & Kahneman, D., pp. 1–11. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
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
Gilbert, D. T., Pelham, B. W. & Krull, D. S. (2003) The psychology of good ideas. Psychological Inquiry 14:258–60.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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K. & Bloom, P. (2007) Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature 450:557–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haslam, N., Rothschild, L. & Ernst, D. (2000) Essentialist beliefs about social categories. British Journal of Social Psychology 39:113–27. doi:10.1348/014466600164363.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hatano, G. & Inagaki, K. (1994) Young children's naive theory of biology. Cognition 50:171–88.Google Scholar
Heider, F. (1958) The psychology of interpersonal relations. Wiley.Google Scholar
Hood, B. M. & Bloom, P. (2008) Children prefer certain individuals over perfect duplicates. Cognition 106:455–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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
Hussak, L. & Cimpian, A. (2013) Why do people think they live in a fair society? A new perspective on the cognitive origins of system justification. Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Cognitive Development Society, Memphis, TN, October 18–19, 2013.Google Scholar
Izard, V., Sann, C., Spelke, E. S. & Streri, A. (2009) Newborn infants perceive abstract numbers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106:10382–85.Google Scholar
Jones, E. E. (1979) The rocky road from acts to dispositions. American Psychologist 34:107–17.Google Scholar
Jones, E. E. & Harris, V. A. (1967) The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3:1–24.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.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1996) On the reality of cognitive illusions. Psychological Review 103:582–91.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
Keil, F. C. (2006) Explanation and understanding. Annual Review of Psychology 57:227–54.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
Kovács, A. M. & Mehler, J. (2009) Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106:6556–60.Google Scholar
Kovács, A. M., Teglas, E. & Endress, A. D. (2010) The social sense: Susceptibility to others' beliefs in human infants and adults. Science 330:1830–34.Google Scholar
Kuhlmeier, V., Wynn, K. & Bloom, P. (2003) Attribution of dispositional states by 12-month-olds. Psychological Science 14:402–408.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Legare, C. H., Gelman, S. A. & Wellman, H. M. (2010) Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children's causal explanatory reasoning. Child Development 81:929–44.Google Scholar
Lewis, D. (1983) Extrinsic properties. Philosophical Studies 44:197–200.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
Lombrozo, T. (2006) The structure and function of explanations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10:464–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lombrozo, T. (2012) Explanation and abductive inference. In: Oxford handbook of thinking and reasoning, ed. Holyoak, K. J. & Morrison, R. G., pp. 260–76. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McRae, K., Cree, G. S., Seidenberg, M. S. & McNorgan, C. (2005) Semantic feature production norms for a large set of living and nonliving things. Behavior Research Methods 37:547–59.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
Monin, B. (2003) The warm glow heuristic: When liking leads to familiarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85:1035–48.Google Scholar
Morris, S. C., Taplin, J. E. & Gelman, S. A. (2000) Vitalism in naive biological thinking. Developmental Psychology 36:582–95.Google Scholar
Morton, J. & Johnson, M. H. (1991) CONSPEC and CONLERN: A two-process theory of infant face recognition. Psychological Review 98:164–81.Google Scholar
Murphy, G. L. & Medin, D. L. (1985) The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92:289–316.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
Nickerson, R. S. (1998) Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology 2:175–220.Google Scholar
Onishi, K. H. & Baillargeon, R. (2005) Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science 308:255–58.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
Prasada, S. & Dillingham, E. (2006) Principled and statistical connections in common sense conception. Cognition 99:73–112.Google Scholar
Prasada, S., Khemlani, S., Leslie, S.-J. & Glucksberg, S. (2013) Conceptual distinctions amongst generics. Cognition 126:405–22.Google Scholar
Pylyshyn, Z. (1989) The role of location indexes in spatial perception: A sketch of the FINST spatial-index model. Cognition 32:65–97.Google Scholar
Railton, P. (1986) Moral realism. Philosophical Review 95:163–207.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
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
Salomon, E. & Cimpian, A. (in preparation) Experimental evidence for an inherence heuristic.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
Scholl, B. J. (2001) Objects and attention: The state of the art. Cognition 80:1–46.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
Setoh, P., Wu, D., Baillargeon, R. & Gelman, R. (2013) Young infants have biological expectations about animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110:15937–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Simon, H. A. (1982) Models of bounded rationality, vol. 3: Empirically grounded economic reason. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. S. & Kinzler, K. D. (2007) Core knowledge. Developmental Science 10:89–96.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
Stanovich, K. E. & West, R. F. (2008) On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94:672–95.Google Scholar
Sunstein, C. R. (2005) Moral heuristics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28:531–73.Google Scholar
Toplak, M. E., West, R. F. & Stanovich, K. E. (2014) Rational thinking and cognitive sophistication: Development, cognitive abilities, and thinking dispositions. Developmental Psychology 50(4):1037–48.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
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1973) Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology 5:207–32.Google Scholar
Weatherson, B. & Marshall, D. (2013) Intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties. In: The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, spring 2013 edition, ed. Zalta, E. N.. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/intrinsic-extrinsic.Google Scholar
Weiner, B. (1985) “Spontaneous” causal thinking. Psychological Bulletin 97:74–84.Google Scholar