Browse > Article
http://dx.doi.org/10.19066/cogsci.2021.32.2.001

Psychological Essentialism and Category Representation  

Kim, ShinWoo (Department of Industrial Psychology, Kwangwoon University)
Jo, Jun-Hyoung (Department of Industrial Psychology, Kwangwoon University)
Li, Hyung-Chul O. (Department of Industrial Psychology, Kwangwoon University)
Publication Information
Korean Journal of Cognitive Science / v.32, no.2, 2021 , pp. 55-73 More about this Journal
Abstract
Psychological essentialism states that people believe some categories to have hidden and defining essential features which cause other features of the category (Gelman, 2003; Hirschfeld, 1996; Medin & Ortony, 1989). Essentialist belief on categories questions the Roschian argument (Rosch, 1973, 1978) that categories merely consist of clusters of correlated features. Unlike family resemblance categories, essentialized categories are likely to have clear between-category boundaries and high within-category coherence (Gelman, 2003; Prentice & Miller, 2007). Two experiments were conducted to test the effects of essentialist belief on category representation (i.e., between-category boundary, within-category coherence). Participants learned family resemblance and essentialized categories in their assigned conditions and then performed categorization task (Expt. 1) and frequency estimation task of category exemplars (Expt. 2). The results showed, in essentialized categories, both boundary intensification and greater category coherence. Theses results are likely to have arisen due to increased cue and category validity in essentialized categories and suggest that essentialist belief influences macroscopic representation of category structure.
Keywords
Psychological essentialism; family resemblance; category representation; cue validity; category validity;
Citations & Related Records
연도 인용수 순위
  • Reference
1 Rips, L. J. (1989). Similarity, typicality, and categorization. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 21-59). New York: Cambridge University Press.
2 Hirschfeld, L. A. (1996). Race in the making: Cognition, culture, and the child's construction of human kinds. The MIT Press.
3 도은영, 이국희 (2020). 범주 응집성과 기저율의 상호작용이 선호의 이유 추정에 미치는 효과. 인지과학, 31(3), 77-102.   DOI
4 Murphy, G. L., & Medin, D. L. (1985). The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review, 92(3), 289-316.   DOI
5 Osherson, D. N., & Smith, E. E. (1981). On the adequacy of prototype theory as a theory of concepts. Cognition, 9(1), 35-58.   DOI
6 Palmeri, T. J., & Blalock, C. (2000). The role of background knowledge in speeded perceptual categorization. Cognition, 77(2), B45-B57.
7 Posner, M. I., & Keele, S. W. (1968). On the genesis of abstract ideas. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(3, Pt.1), 353-363.   DOI
8 Rosch, E. H. (1973). Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 4(3), 328-350.   DOI
9 Rehder, B. (2007). Essentialism as a generative theory of classification. In A. Gopnik, & L. Schultz (Eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation (pp. 190-207). Oxford University Press.
10 Rehder, B., & Kim, S. (2009). Classification as diagnostic reasoning. Memory and Cognition, 37(6), 715-729.   DOI
11 Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In: E. Rosch, & B. B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 28-49). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
12 Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. B. (1975). Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 7(4), 573-605.   DOI
13 Rothbart, M., & Taylor, M. (1992). Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? In G. R. Semin & K. Fiedler (Eds.), Language, interaction and social cognition (p. 11-36). Sage Publications, Inc.
14 Yuill, N. (1992). Children's conception of personality traits. Human Development, 35(5), 265-279.   DOI
15 Posner, M. I., & Keele, S. W. (1970). Retention of abstract ideas. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 83(2, Pt.1), 304-308.   DOI
16 Smith, E. E., Shoben, E. J., & Rips, L. J. (1974). Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisions. Psychological Review, 81(3), 214-241.   DOI
17 양현보, 김비아, 이동훈 (2020). 혼합정서 얼굴표정의 범주적 지각에 미치는 정서명칭 효과. 한국심리학회지: 인지 및 생물, 32(2), 235-248.   DOI
18 Davoodi, T., Soley, G., Harris, P. L., & Blake, P. R. (2020). Essentialization of Social Categories Across Development in Two Cultures. Child development, 91(1), 289-306.   DOI
19 Harris, H. D., & Rehder, B. (2006). Modeling category learning with exemplars and prior knowledge. In R. Sun & N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1440-1445). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
20 Ahn, W. K., Taylor, E. G., Kato, D., Marsh, J. K., & Bloom, P. (2013). Causal essentialism in kinds. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 66(6), 1113-1130.   DOI
21 Gelman, S. A., & Markman, E. M. (1986). Categories and induction in young children. Cognition, 23(3), 183-209.   DOI
22 Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
23 Lisker, L. & Abramson, A. S. (1964) A Cross-Language Study of Voicing in Initial Stops: Acoustical Measurements. WORD, 20(3), 384-422.   DOI
24 Malt, B. C. (1994). Water is not H2O. Cognitive Psychology, 27(1), 41-70.   DOI
25 Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (p. 179-195). Cambridge University Press.
26 Murphy, G. L. (2002). The big book of concepts. MIT Press.
27 Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., Hoffman, H. S., & Griffith, B. C. (1957). The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54(5), 358-368.   DOI
28 Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (1991). Insides and essences: Early understandings of the nonobvious. Cognition, 38(3), 213-244.   DOI
29 Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3), 192-233.   DOI
30 Bourne, L. E. (1970). Knowing and using concepts. Psychological Review, 77(6), 546-556.   DOI
31 Haslam, N., Rothschild, L., & Ernst, D. (2000). Essentialist beliefs about social categories. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39(1), 113-127.   DOI
32 신현정 (2011). 개념과 범주적 사고 학지사.
33 최인범, 이형철, 김신우 (2021). 인과적 사슬구조에서의 범주기반 속성추론. 감성과학, 24(1), 59-72.
34 Eberhardt, J. L. & Randall, J. L. (1997). The essential notion of face. Psychological Science, 8(3), 198-203.   DOI
35 Bruner, J. S., Goodnow, J. J., & Austin, G. A. (1956). A study of thinking. John Wiley and Sons.
36 Kikutani, M., Roberson, D., & Hanley, J. R. (2008). What's in the name? Categorical perception for unfamiliar faces can occur through labeling. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(4), 787-794.   DOI
37 Patalano, A. L., & Ross, B. H. (2007). The role of category coherence in experience-based prediction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(4), 629-634.   DOI
38 Luhmann, C. C., Ahn, W.-K., & Palmeri, T. J. (2006). Theory-based categorization under speeded conditions. Memory & Cognition, 34(5), 1102-1111.   DOI
39 Miller, G. A., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1976). Language and perception. Belknap Press.
40 Newman, G. E. (2019). The psychology of authenticity. Review of General Psychology, 23(1), 8-18.   DOI
41 Prentice, D. A., & Miller, D. T. (2007). Psychological essentialism on human categories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(4), 202-206.   DOI
42 Rehder, B., & Murphy, G. L. (2003). A knowledge-resonance (KRES) model of category learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(4), 759-784.   DOI
43 Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8(3), 382-439.   DOI
44 Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Macmillan.
45 Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: The origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press.