Generic Statements Require Little Evidence for Acceptance but Have Powerful Implications

Abstract

Generic statements (e.g., ''Birds lay eggs'') express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as ''Lorches have purple feathers'' as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics' meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse.

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

“…Generics are not disconfirmed by counterexamples (the existence of a nonflying bird does not disconfirm the generic claim that birds fly) (45,46), which means that generic messages can trump a listener's personal experiences. People produce generics about features they consider conceptually important (e.g., dangerous or distinctive), even when they know them to be variably present in a category, but those who hear such generics (whether adults or young children) tend to assume that the feature is almost universally present among category members (43,146). This results in systematic distortions in the transmission process, from variability to category-wide consistency.…”

Memory accessibility shapes explanation: Testing key claims of the inherence heuristic account

“…For instance, the influence that stereotypes or other societal constraints exert on women's behavior is seldom apparent to a naive observer, resulting in a weaker associative link between such extrinsic factors and the concept woman in semantic memory. Even when they are noticed, extrinsic forces may be more cumbersome to describe in language, whereas inherent ones can often be expressed in a few words (e.g., via generic statements about what the relevant entities are or have, as in "Women aren't brilliant"; e.g., Cimpian, Brandone, & Gelman, 2010). Any such difference in how complex it is to talk about inherent and extrinsic facts-and thus in how often they are actually talked about-could contribute to an accessibility difference between them.…”

Generics Articulate Default Generalizations

“…Toddlers begin to produce generics at approximately 30 months of age, which is the first time that they reliably have the requisite background syntactic capabilities (e.g., sufficiently many words per utterance, plurality, etc; Gelman, 2010;Gelman, Goetz, Sarnecka & Flukes, 2008). By the time children are between 3 to 4 years of age, they produce generics as frequently as adults do-which is not something that is true for all parts of language by a long shot (Gelman et al, 2008).…”

“…However, the support is only indirect, since it does not involve directly testing the impact of a property's being dangerous on people's judgments. Recent work conducted by Andrei Cimpian, Amanda Brandone, and Susan Gelman, however, examined precisely this question (Cimpian, Brandone & Gelman, 2010). In their experiment, participants were told about a novel animal kind, e.g.…”