The influence of expertise on essence beliefs for mental and medical disorder categories

Cooper, Jessica A.; Marsh, Jessecae K.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.07.016

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…In contrast, human norms and essentialism extend beyond content with obvious survival value to include any aspect of experience. Essentialism applies to natural substances, living kinds, human social groups, personal characteristics, diseases, and in some respects even artifacts (31,82,113,(160)(161)(162)(163)(164)(165). Similarly, normative expectations extend to a vast array of behaviors, including which clothing to wear, which music to listen to, or which games to play (68).…”

Section: Norms and Essentialism In Nonhuman Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

Gelman

Roberts

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

124

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It is widely recognized that language plays a key role in the transmission of human culture, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms by which language simultaneously encourages both cultural stability and cultural innovation. This paper examines this issue by focusing on the use of language to transmit categories, focusing on two universal devices: labels (e.g., shark, woman) and generics (e.g., "sharks attack swimmers"; "women are nurturing"). We propose that labels and generics each assume two key principles: norms and essentialism. The normative assumption permits transmission of category information with great fidelity, whereas essentialism invites innovation by means of an open-ended, placeholder structure. Additionally, we sketch out how labels and generics aid in conceptual alignment and the progressive "looping" between categories and cultural practices. In this way, human language is a technology that enhances and expands the categorization capacities that we share with other animals.language | categories | essentialism | norms | children

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Section: Norms and Essentialism In Nonhuman Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

Gelman

Roberts

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

124

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“…Also, would there be an effect similar to the label effect if unlabeled information were shown to people whose theory of the world is not naive in the health domain (e.g., doctors)? As we know, expertise in a domain can have an effect on categorical proceedings and judgments (Proffitt et al, 2000;Hayes and Chen, 2008;Wattenmaker et al, 2015). Furthermore, there is already some evidence that medical professionals are also influenced by artificial labels that are claimed to be conventional when it comes to explaining illnesses (Hemmatian et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Explanatory Effect of a Label: Its Influence on a Category Persists Even If We Forget the Label

2022

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In this study we replicated the explanatory effect of a label which had been found by Giffin et al. (2017). In their experiments, they used vignettes describing an odd behavior of a person based on culturally specific disorders that were unfamiliar to respondents. It turned out that explanations which explain an odd behavior through a person’s tendency to behave that way (circulus vitiosus) seemed more persuasive if the disorder was given a label that was used in the explanation. We replicated these results in Experiment 1, and in a follow-up Experiment 2 we examined the familiarity with category information and the evaluation of that category over time (the delay lasted one week). We realized that the label effect persists even when people make judgments based on their recollections about a category. Furthermore, according to a content analysis of the recollections, participants in the label condition remembered more information from the vignettes but tended to forget an artificial label; however, they used other words from the disorder domain instead (like “disease” or “kleptomania”). This allowed us to suggest a new interpretation of this effect: we suppose that in the Giffin et al. (2017) experiments the label did not bring any new features to a category itself, but pointed to a relevant domain instead, so the effect appeared from the activation of areas of knowledge in semantic memory and the application of relevant schema for learning a new phenomenon.

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“…Even when labels do provide important information, community cues can result in unfounded assumptions about the entities subsumed under the category. Labeling a bundle of psychological symptoms can lead to beliefs in laypeople that they share a causal core, even when explicitly told otherwise (Cooper & Marsh, 2015; Giffin et al, 2017). Such beliefs can go on to affect our attitudes about their treatment, prognosis, and the role of environmental factors, among other things (Ahn, Kim, & Lebowitz, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community appeal: Explanation without information.

Hemmatian

Sloman

2018

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Formal or categorical explanation involves the use of a label to explain a property of an object or group of objects. In four experiments, we provide evidence that label entrenchment, the degree to which a label is accepted and used by members of the community, influences the judged quality of a categorical explanation whether or not the explanation offers substantive information about the explanandum. Experiment 1 shows that explanations using unentrenched labels are seen as less comprehensive and less natural, independent of the causal information they provide. Experiment 2 shows that these intuitions persist when the community has no additional, relevant featural information, so the label amounts to a mere name for the explanandum. Experiment 3 finds a similar effect when the unentrenched label is not widely used, but is defined by a group of experts and the recipient of the explanation is herself an expert familiar with the topic. The effect also obtains for categories that lack a coherent causal structure. Experiment 4 further demonstrates the domain generality of the entrenchment effect and provides evidence against several interpretations of the results. A majority of participants in Experiments 3 and 4 could not report the impact of entrenchment on their judgments. We argue that this reliance on community cues arose because the community often has useful information to provide about categories. The common use of labels as conduits for this communal knowledge results in reliance on community cues even when they are uninformative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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The influence of expertise on essence beliefs for mental and medical disorder categories

Cited by 7 publications

References 41 publications

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

The Explanatory Effect of a Label: Its Influence on a Category Persists Even If We Forget the Label

Community appeal: Explanation without information.

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