Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most theories of kind representation suggest that people positinternal, essence-like factors believed to underlie kindmembership and the observable properties of members.Across two studies (N = 234), we show that adults canconstrue properties of social kinds as products of both internaland structural (stable external) factors. Internalist andstructural construals are similar in that both support formalexplanations (i.e., “category member has property P due tocategory membership C”), generic claims (“Cs have P”), anda particular pattern of generalization to individuals when theindividuals’ category membership and structural position arepreserved. Our findings thus challenge these phenomena assignatures of essentialist thinking. However, once categorymembership and structural position are unconfounded,different patterns of generalization emerge across internalistand structural construals, as do different judgmentsconcerning category definitions and property mutability.These findings have important implications for reasoningabout social kinds.