The importance of being coherent: Category coherence, cross-classification, and reasoning

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Abstract

Category-based inference is crucial for using past experiences to make sense of new ones. One challenge to inference of this kind is that most entities in the world belong to multiple categories (e.g., a jogger, a professor, and a vegetarian). We tested the hypothesis that the degree of coherence of a category—the degree to which category features go together in light of prior knowledge—influences the extent to which one category will be used over another in property inference. The first two experiments demonstrate that when multiple social categories are available, high coherence categories are selected and used as the basis of inference more often than less coherent ones. The second two experiments provide evidence that ease of category-based explanation of properties is a viable account for coherence differences. We conclude that degree of coherence meaningfully applies to natural social categories, and is an important influence on category use in reasoning.

Section snippets

Cross-classification

Past research has identified three influences on category preference when more than one category is available. First, people are more inclined to use the category with the greatest relevance to the property in question (Heit and Rubinstein, 1994, Kalish and Gelman, 1992, Murphy and Ross, 1999, Ross and Murphy, 1999). Second, inferences are more often made from categories with increased mental activation relative to others (Macrae et al., 1995, Sinclair and Kunda, 1999, Smith et al., 1996). And

Category coherence

Category coherence refers to the extent to which category features go together in light of prior theoretical, causal, and teleological knowledge (Medin, 1989, Murphy and Medin, 1985; see Murphy, 2002, for a review) rather than being just incidentally co-occurring. “Lives in water, eats fish, has many offspring, is small” describes a more coherent category than “lives in water, eat wheat, has a flat end, is used for stabbing bugs” (Murphy & Wisniewski, 1989). It is well documented that most

Current research

The present research was guided by two major goals. The first goal was to consider the extent to which category coherence influences category use in reasoning from multiple categories. In particular, when high and low coherence categories are placed in direct competition with one another, are higher coherence categories favored over less coherent ones? The second goal was to begin to explore cognitive processes underlying differential use of high versus low coherence categories, looking at how

Pretesting of categories

In using natural categories, we must specify how the degree of coherence for particular categories is established. For example, consider the categories of “ministers” and “county clerks.” Our intuition is that, consistent with a common cause notion of coherence, ministers are associated with deep underlying traits such as belief in God, compassion for others, and satisfaction in attending to the spiritual needs of a community. These features give rise to surface behaviors such as being on a

Experiment 1: Basic inference

With materials from the pretest in hand, we were now able to develop a set of inference problems involving entities belonging to multiple categories. Specifically, problems similar in structure to those used by Nelson and Miller (1995) were developed. These problems asked participants to make property inferences about individuals belonging to two categories, with the difficulty being that the categories provided conflicting information. For six coherence problems, high and low coherence

Experiment 2: Information selection

In Experiment 2, we developed problems in which participants could select categories about which they desired inference-related information. For example, one could choose the category “waiter” and find out that “20% of waiters prefer Coca-Cola to Pepsi.” For each problem, there were two high and two low coherence categories; participants could choose as few as one category or as many as all four. The dependent measure was the number of high versus low coherence categories about which

Experiments 3a and b: Single-category explanations

One possible cognitive explanation for the results of the first two experiments is that individuals engage in explanation-based reasoning about new properties. Heit and Rubinstein, 1994, Sloman, 1994 found that people were more inclined to transfer a property from one category to another when they could generate a single coherent explanation for its presence in both categories. Sloman (1994) offered the example that “Many ex-cons are hired as bodyguards. Therefore many war veterans are hired as

Experiment 4

The materials used in this experiment were similar to those of Experiment 3a except that each problem described people who were members of two categories (one high and one low coherence category) rather than one. Participants were asked to generate three different explanations for the stated preference. At the end of the task, they were asked to go back and circle the most plausible explanation (from among the three) for each problem. We hypothesized that explanations would make reference to

Summary of results

The primary purpose of the experiments was to better understand the role of category coherence in reasoning about cross-classified entities. In pretests, we identified social categories that varied in similarity, one marker for coherence, and then provided confirmation that these categories also differed on other measures associated with coherence including entitativity (Haslam et al., 2000) and the presence of deep features (Ahn, 1998, Keil, 1989). We also found that distinctiveness and

Conclusions

Category-based induction involves not only assigning an entity to one or more categories but also deciding which of these categories to use to inform inference. Based on the experiments presented in this paper, we conclude that natural social categories vary in coherence, the coherence of social categories is an important determinant of which one or more categories are selected and used to make an inference, and category-based explanation may serve as an important mechanism for linking novel

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    This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SBR 97-20304. We thank Nick Haslam and Gregory Murphy for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to Melissa Paulson and Jane Erickson for their assistance in data collection.

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