Why essences are essential in the psychology of concepts

Ahn, Woo kyoung; Kalish, Charles W.; Gelman, Susan A.; Medin, Douglas L.; Luhmann, Christian C.; Atran, Scott; Coley, John D.; Shafto, Patrick

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(01)00145-7

Cited by 175 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…In other words, we believe that these effects fall directly out of the concept of a good true self, which is thought to arise from psychological essentialism, the tendency to understand entities in terms of a deeper, unobservable essence (Ahn et al, 2001;Gelman, 2003;Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011;Keil, 1989;Medin & Ortony, 1989;Xu, & Rhemtulla, 2005). Just as people show a robust, cross-cultural tendency to posit an unobservable essence for a variety of entities (e.g., Atran, 1993;Brown, 1991;Gil-White, 2001;Hirschfeld, 1998;Sousa, Atran, & Medin, 2002), they appear to posit an unobservable essence of the self, yielding the notion of a 'true self' (for a review, see De Freitas et al, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep Down My Enemy is Good: Thinking About the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias

Freitas¹,

Cikara²

2017

Preprint

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TRUE SELF & INTERGROUP BIAS 2Intergroup bias -preference for one's in-group relative to out-groups -is one of the most robust phenomena in all of psychology. Here we investigate whether a positive bias that operates at the individual-level, belief in a good true self, may be leveraged to reduce intergroup bias. We find that even stereotypically threatening out-group agents are believed to have a good true self (Experiment 1). More importantly, consideration of in-group and outgroup members' true self reduces intergroup bias, both in the form of explicit evaluative judgments (Experiment 2) and actual donation behavior (Experiment 3). Across studies, the palliative effects of thinking of an individual's true self generalize to that individual's entire group. In sum, a simple intervention -thinking about another's true self -reduces the gap in how people evaluate and treat out-group relative to in-group members. We discuss implications of these findings for conflict reduction strategies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep Down My Enemy is Good: Thinking About the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias

Freitas¹,

Cikara²

2017

Preprint

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“…When 3-year-olds are shown a leaf, an insect and a leaf-insect, they believe that the leaf-insect will behave more like an insect than like a leaf, even though it looks more like a leaf (Gelman 2004). Children from such dissimilar cultures as Mesoamerican Mayas (Atran et al 2004) and WestAfrican Yoruba (Ahn et al 2001) hold the belief that superficial changes do not alter a living thingÕs core identity. Lay adults too draw inferences based on taxonomic affiliation, rather than on superficial characteristics, e.g.…”

Section: Essentialism and Humanized Apesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Intuitive Ontologies in Scientific Understanding – the Case of Human Evolution

Cruz¹,

Smedt

2006

Biol Philos

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Abstract. Psychological evidence suggests that laypeople understand the world around them in terms of intuitive ontologies which describe broad categories of objects in the world, such as ÔpersonÕ, ÔartefactÕ and ÔanimalÕ. However, because intuitive ontologies are the result of natural selection, they only need to be adaptive; this does not guarantee that the knowledge they provide is a genuine reflection of causal mechanisms in the world. As a result, science has parted ways with intuitive ontologies. Nevertheless, since the brain is evolved to understand objects in the world according to these categories, we can expect that they continue to play a role in scientific understanding. Taking the case of human evolution, we explore relationships between intuitive ontological and scientific understanding. We show that intuitive ontologies not only shape intuitions on human evolution, but also guide the direction and topics of interest in its research programmes. Elucidating the relationships between intuitive ontologies and science may help us gain a clearer insight into scientific understanding.

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“…Categorizations of artefacts do not rely on essential features, nor are they stable; instead they depend on the demands of the situation (Sloman and Malt, 2003). Numerous studies have show that different kinds of features are important to natural kind versus artefact categories (see Medin et al, 2000, for a review): essential physical features are important for biological categories (Ahn et al, 2001), and functional features are more important for artefacts. People look for common causes and common effects when constructing categories; membership of a single causal chain is less significant (Ahn, 1999).…”

Section: Concepts Are Explanatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We apply causal reasoning to explain category membership (Ahn, 1999;Ahn et al, 2001;Rehder and Hastie, 2004). For instance, Wisniewski and Medin (1994) found that people learning categories and formulating categorization rules for drawings of people proceeded very differently if they were told that the categories were 'drawn by creative and non-creative children', rather than 'Group 1 and Group 2'.…”

Section: Concepts Are Explanatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological challenges for the analysis of style

Stacey

2006

AIEDAM

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Analyses of styles in design have paid little attention to how people see style, and how designers use perceptions of style to guide designing. While formal and computational methods for analysing styles and generating designs provide impressively parsimonious accounts of what some styles are, they do not address many of the factors that influence how humans understand styles. The subtlety of human style judgements raises challenges for computational approaches to style. This paper differentiates between a range of distinct meanings of 'style', and explores how designers and ordinary people learn and apply perceptual similarity classes and style concepts in different situations to interpret and create designed artefacts. A range of psychological evidence indicates that style perception is dependent on knowledge, and involves the interaction of perceptual recognition of style features and explanatory inference processes that create a coherent understanding of an object as an exemplar of a style. This paper concludes by outlining how formal style analyses can be used in combination with psychological research to develop a fuller understanding of style perception and creative design.

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Why essences are essential in the psychology of concepts

Cited by 175 publications

References 20 publications

Deep Down My Enemy is Good: Thinking About the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias

Deep Down My Enemy is Good: Thinking About the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias

The Role of Intuitive Ontologies in Scientific Understanding – the Case of Human Evolution

Psychological challenges for the analysis of style

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