Why Do People Tend to Infer “Ought” From “Is”? The Role of Biases in Explanation

Abstract

People tend to judge what is typical as also good and appropriate-as what ought to be. What accounts for the prevalence of these judgments, given that their validity is at best uncertain? We hypothesized that the tendency to reason from "is" to "ought" is due in part to a systematic bias in people's (nonmoral) explanations, whereby regularities (e.g., giving roses on Valentine's Day) are explained predominantly via inherent or intrinsic facts (e.g., roses are beautiful). In turn, these inherence-biased explanations lead to value-laden downstream conclusions (e.g., it is good to give roses). Consistent with this proposal, results from five studies (N = 629 children and adults) suggested that, from an early age, the bias toward inherence in explanations fosters inferences that imbue observed reality with value. Given that explanations fundamentally determine how people understand the world, the bias toward inherence in these judgments is likely to exert substantial influence over sociomoral understanding.

Investigating the origins of political views: biases in explanation predict conservative attitudes in children and adults

“…If patterns are thought to arise because of the inherent properties of their constituents, then it also appears natural, and even good, that they should exist as such (Tworek & Cimpian, 2016). Most relevant to our argument here, explaining via inherent features tends to imbue the explananda (i.e., the observations being explained) with a degree of naturalness and meaningfulness.…”

“…This poses a challenge, however, because there are several resource-intensive operations that need to be performed while constructing an explanation (e.g., retrieving relevant factors from long-term memory, weighing these factors against one another in working memory, evaluating the plausibility of the selected answer). As a result, people have a tendency to explain events and patterns in the world (e.g., why engagement rings typically have diamonds) as being due to the inherent features of the entities involved (e.g., diamonds are beautiful), overlooking non-inherent factors that are available in memory but less likely to be retrieved in the moment (e.g., marketing campaigns; Tworek & Cimpian, 2016). This heuristic reliance on easily accessible information comes at a cost, though, insofar as it gives rise to a bias in the content of the explanations generated: When memory is queried about a certain entity, the information that's most easily accessible is often inherent information (Lewis, 1983;Weatherson & Marshall, 2014) -that is, information about the entity itself rather than its context, history, or relations with other entities (e.g., Higgins, 1996;Hussak & Cimpian, 2014;McRae, Cree, Seidenberg, & McNorgan, 2005).…”

“…With respect to the last point, the inherence heuristic has been shown to operate across development (Cimpian & Steinberg, 2014;Hussak & Cimpian, 2015;Tworek & Cimpian, 2016). In addition, we tested (1) whether the heuristic processes involved in explanation constitute a unique source of conservative ideology, not reducible to previously identified inputs into conservative thought, and (2) whether this low-effort explanatory heuristic promotes conservative attitudes in children as well.…”

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

“…Because of the immediate accessibility of inherent information, people likewise overestimate the stability and immutability of current societal structures (Cimpian & Steinberg, 2014). If Group A is understood to have high status because of their smarts, then it may also appear to a reasoner that this group has always been, and will always be, at the top of the socioeconomic ladder-and perhaps even that they ought to be there (Tworek & Cimpian, 2016). These considerations illustrate the profound impact that the inherence bias in explanation is likely to have on how individuals understand and interact with the world.…”

Utilitarian Moral Judgment Exclusively Coheres with Inference from Is to Ought

“…In previous work (Elqayam et al, 2015) we proposed that inference from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ is a pivotal, species-specific process in human cognition, through which humans generate novel norms where no norms existed previously (see also Schmidt et al, 2016; Tworek and Cimpian, 2016). We call this type of inference deontic introduction , because the inference introduces deontic terms in the conclusion of an argument.…”