Cognition 167:25-37 (2017)
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Abstract |
People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms.
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Reprint years | 2017 |
DOI | 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.10.024 |
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References found in this work BETA
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart.Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd & A. B. C. Research Group - 1999 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press USA.
Cause and Norm.Christopher Hitchcock & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy 106 (11):587-612.
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Citations of this work BETA
Normality and Actual Causal Strength.Thomas Icard, Jonathan Kominsky & Joshua Knobe - 2017 - Cognition 161:80-93.
Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments.Paul Henne, Kevin O’Neill, Paul Bello, Sangeet Khemlani & Felipe De Brigard - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (1):e12931.
How We Know What Not To Think.Jonathan Phillips, Adam Morris & Fiery Cushman - 2019 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23 (12):1026-1040.
A Simple Definition of ‘Intentionally’.Tadeg Quillien & Tamsin C. German - 2021 - Cognition 214:104806.
Normality: a Two-Faced Concept.Tomasz Wysocki - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (4):689-716.
View all 24 citations / Add more citations
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2016-11-29
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