Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Generic statements (e.g., “girls wear makeup”) tie properties to groups and are a common way of transmitting stereotypes. One natural but untested way that people might try to undermine these statements is by making a similar statement about salient but not mentioned contrastive groups (e.g., “boys can wear makeup too”). Do can generics license the same judgments as do generics? Four studies examined how adults judge two novel groups when one group does a property (e.g., Zarpies make pizzas) while the other group can do the property (e.g., Gorps can make pizzas too). Compared to do generics, adults consistently judged groups described with can generics to be less likely to have, less interested in, less competent at, and for it to be less permissible for them to do the property. Overall, these results suggest that can generics are unlikely to be an effective means at equating beliefs about two groups.