• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.77-102
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• 2020

Some progress has been made in the study of the category coherence effect, which states that the attributes of soldiers or nuns with similarities in dress and behavior, and easily distinguished from other categories, are likely to be generalized. However, few studies have examined the fundamental psychological mechanisms that underlie this category coherence effect, and this study aims to fill this gap. For this purpose, two experiments were conducted after selecting categories with high coherence (nuns, soldiers, and flight attendants) and those with low coherence (interpreters, wedding planners, and florists). In experiment 1, we observed that the members of a category were presumed to have certain reasons to prefer [property X] (presumption of reasons for preference), with this presumption becoming stronger when [property X] was observed repeatedly in high-coherence categories than in the case of low-coherence categories. Experiment 2 showed that for the high-coherence categories, the presumption of reasons for preference was stronger when [property X], rarely seen in everyday life (base rate of 30%), was observed, while the presumption of reasons for preference was weaker when [property Y] (base rate 70%), frequently seen in everyday life, was observed. In the low-coherence categories, the presumption of reasons for preference tended to be weak for both rare and frequent attributes. That is, there were significant effects of the two-way interaction between category coherence and base rate on the presumption of reasons for preference. This study has implications for psychological essentialism and stereotyping.