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. Specifically, we propose that the fundamental mechanisms through which people explain the world around them may also be a source of such attitudes. These explanatory processes are inadvertently biased to yield inherent or internal facts as explanations for a wide variety of social and natural phenomena, including sociopolitical patterns (e.g., Why are some people rich? Because they are really smart). In turn, this bias toward inherent attributions makes it seem that the observations being explained (such as the societal status quo) are legitimate and thus worthy of support. Four studies with participants as young as 4 years of age provided correlational and experimental evidence for the hypothesized link between explanatory processes and support for the status quo. These findings suggest that the tendency to endorse existing sociopolitical arrangements emerges partly on a foundation laid early in life by a basic component of human cognition.
Concepts of national groups (e.g., Americans, Canadians) are an important source of identity and meaning in people’s lives. Here, we provide a developmental investigation of these concepts. Across 3 studies involving 5- to 8-year-olds and adults in the United States, we found that (a) compared with older children and adults, young children were more likely to think that national groups have a biological basis, but that (b) other aspects of national group concepts—such as the idea that national group membership is stable and informative about a person—changed less with development. Moreover, with age, the notion that membership in a national group is a meaningful fact about a person (vs. a mere formality) began to link up with attitudes that rationalized the national ingroup’s economic advantages and portrayed it as superior to national outgroups. This work contributes to theory on the development of social cognition and provides a unique source of insight into current political trends.
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.g., why does this group have low status?), people often rely on facts that they can retrieve easily from memory - facts that are skewed toward inherent or intrinsic features (e.g., this group is unintelligent). We hypothesized that this bias in the content of heuristic explanations leads to a tendency to (1) view socioeconomic stratification as acceptable and (2) prefer current societal arrangements to alternative ones, two hallmarks of conservative ideology. Moreover, since the inherence bias in explanation is present across development, we expected it to shape children's proto-political judgments as well. Three studies with adults and 4- to 8-year-old children (N = 784) provided support for these predictions: Not only did individual differences in reliance on inherent explanations uniquely predict endorsement of conservative views (particularly the stratification-supporting component; Study 1), but manipulations of this explanatory bias also had downstream consequences for political attitudes in both children and adults (Studies 2 and 3). This work contributes to our understanding of the origins of political attitudes.
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 and may instead use the information that is most easily accessible in memory (Cimpian & Salomon 2014a, 2014b. In the present research, we tested two key claims of this proposal that have so far not been investigated. First, we tested whetheras previously hypothesized-the information about an entity that is most accessible in memory tends to consist of inherent or intrinsic facts about that entity rather than extrinsic (contextual, historical, etc.) facts about it (Studies 1 and 2). Second, we tested the implications of this difference in the memory accessibility of inherent vs. extrinsic facts for the process of generating explanations: Does the fact that inherent facts are more accessible than relevant extrinsic facts give rise to an inherence bias in the content of the explanations generated (Studies 3 and 4)? The findings supported the proposal that everyday explanations are generated in part via a heuristic process that relies on easily accessible-and often inherent-information from memory.Keywords: explanation; heuristics; inherence heuristic; memory; accessibility Memory Accessibility Shapes Explanation 3 Memory Accessibility Shapes Explanation: Testing Key Claims of the Inherence Heuristic AccountThe ability to generate explanations allows people to abstract meaning from everyday experiences. From a young age, we make sense of the world by seeking to explain what we observe and what we hear from others (e.g., Carey, 1985;Gelman, 2003;Gopnik, 1998; Keil, 2006; Lombrozo, 2012;Wellman, 2011). What underlies the ability to explain? The literature on this topic provides many insights into the workings of everyday explanations, including their typical structure (i.e., the "ingredients" that go into a satisfying explanation; e.g., Lombrozo & Carey, 2006; Lombrozo, 2007;Sloman, 2005) and their influence on learning (e.g., Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989;Legare & Lombrozo, 2014; Lombrozo & Gwynne, 2014;Murphy & Allopenna, 1994).Comparatively speaking, however, research on the processes by which people generate explanations is relatively scarce (but see the literature on the related problem of generating causal hypotheses: e.g., Ahn, Kalish, Medin, & Gelman, 1995; Johnson & Keil, 2014; Lagnado & Sloman, 2006). Perhaps one of the most significant omissions in the recent work on explanation concerns the ways in which the dynamics of memory retrieval shape the search for explanations. Even though making sense of most observations requires that reasoners access knowledge stored in long-term memory (e.g., Lombrozo, 2006Lombrozo, , 2012, the research on explanations has seldom explored systema...
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