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Susan A. Gelman [55]Susan Gelman [8]
  1.  42
    Categories and induction in young children.Susan A. Gelman & Ellen M. Markman - 1986 - Cognition 23 (3):183-209.
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  2.  61
    Insides and Essences: Early Understandings of the Non- Obvious.Susan A. Gelman & Henry M. Wellman - 1991 - Cognition 38 (3):213-244.
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  3.  65
    The role of covariation versus mechanism information in causal attribution.Woo-Kyoung Ahn, Charles W. Kalish, Douglas L. Medin & Susan A. Gelman - 1995 - Cognition 54 (3):299-352.
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  4. Generic Statements Require Little Evidence for Acceptance but Have Powerful Implications.Andrei Cimpian, Amanda C. Brandone & Susan A. Gelman - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (8):1452-1482.
    Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...)
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  5.  84
    Quantified Statements are Recalled as Generics: Evidence from Preschool Children and Adults.Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan Gelman - 2012 - Cognitive Psychology 64 (186):214.
  6.  67
    How biological is essentialism.Susan A. Gelman & Lawrence A. Hirschfeld - 1999 - In Douglas L. Medin & Scott Atran (eds.), Folkbiology. MIT Press. pp. 403--446.
  7.  31
    Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co‐Existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across Development.Cristine H. Legare & Susan A. Gelman - 2008 - Cognitive Science 32 (4):607-642.
    Three studies examined the co‐existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5‐, 7‐, 11‐, and 15‐year‐olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho‐speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were both available. Results indicated that, although biological explanations for illness were endorsed at high levels, witchcraft was also often endorsed. More important, bewitchment explanations were neither the result of ignorance nor replaced by biological (...)
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  8.  98
    Why essences are essential in the psychology of concepts.Woo-Kyoung Ahn, Charles Kalish, Susan A. Gelman, Douglas L. Medin, Christian Luhmann, Scott Atran, John D. Coley & Patrick Shafto - 2001 - Cognition 82 (1):59-69.
  9.  58
    Generic Language for Social and Animal Kinds: An Examination of the Asymmetry Between Acceptance and Inferences.Federico Cella, Kristan A. Marchak, Claudia Bianchi & Susan A. Gelman - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (12):e13209.
    Generics (e.g., “Ravens are black”) express generalizations about categories or their members. Previous research found that generics about animals are interpreted as broadly true of members of a kind, yet also accepted based on minimal evidence. This asymmetry is important for suggesting a mechanism by which unfounded generalizations may flourish; yet, little is known whether this finding extends to generics about groups of people (heretofore, “social generics”). Accordingly, in four preregistered studies (n = 665), we tested for an inferential asymmetry (...)
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  10.  91
    Early word-learning entails reference, not merely associations.Sandra R. Waxman & Susan A. Gelman - 2009 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 (6):258-263.
  11. Artifacts and Essentialism.Susan A. Gelman - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3):449-463.
    Psychological essentialism is an intuitive folk belief positing that certain categories have a non-obvious inner “essence” that gives rise to observable features. Although this belief most commonly characterizes natural kind categories, I argue that psychological essentialism can also be extended in important ways to artifact concepts. Specifically, concepts of individual artifacts include the non-obvious feature of object history, which is evident when making judgments regarding authenticity and ownership. Classic examples include famous works of art (e.g., the Mona Lisa is authentic (...)
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  12.  69
    So It Is, So It Shall Be: Group Regularities License Children's Prescriptive Judgments.Steven O. Roberts, Susan A. Gelman & Arnold K. Ho - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S3):576-600.
    When do descriptive regularities become prescriptive norms? We examined children's and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups that engaged in morally neutral behaviors. Participants were introduced to conforming or non-conforming individuals. Children negatively evaluated non-conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age. These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts and stemmed from reasoning about group regularities rather than reasoning about individual regularities. These data provide new insights into children's group concepts and have (...)
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  13.  96
    Who am I? The role of moral beliefs in children's and adults' understanding of identity.Larisa Heiphetz, Nina Strohminger, Susan Gelman & Liane L. Young - 2018 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology:210-219.
    Adults report that moral characteristics—particularly widely shared moral beliefs—are central to identity. This perception appears driven by the view that changes to widely shared moral beliefs would alter friendships and that this change in social relationships would, in turn, alter an individual's personal identity. Because reasoning about identity changes substantially during adolescence, the current work tested pre- and post-adolescents to reveal the role that such changes could play in moral cognition. Experiment 1 showed that 8- to 10-year-olds, like adults, judged (...)
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  14. Do Lions have Manes? For Children, Generics are about Kinds, not Quantities.Amanda Brandone, Andrei Cimpian, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan Gelman - 2012 - Child Development 83:423-433.
  15. Differences in the Evaluation of Generic Statements About Human and Non‐Human Categories.Arber Tasimi, Susan Gelman, Andrei Cimpian & Joshua Knobe - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (7):1934-1957.
    Generic statements express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. Experiment 2 examined an alternative (...)
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  16.  62
    Children's Developing Intuitions About the Truth Conditions and Implications of Novel Generics Versus Quantified Statements.Amanda C. Brandone, Susan A. Gelman & Jenna Hedglen - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (4):711-738.
    Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by all, most, and some. Results reveal that, like adults, preschoolers recognize that generics have flexible truth conditions and are capable of representing a wide range of prevalence levels; and interpret novel generics as having near-universal prevalence implications. Results further (...)
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  17. Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and India.Meredith Meyer, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Susan A. Gelman & Sarah M. Stilwell - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (1):668-710.
    Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart (...)
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  18.  28
    Shape and representational status in children's early naming.Susan A. Gelman & Karen S. Ebeling - 1998 - Cognition 66 (2):B35-B47.
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  19.  43
    Causal status effect in children's categorization.Woo-Kyoung Ahn, Susan A. Gelman, Jennifer A. Amsterlaw, Jill Hohenstein & Charles W. Kalish - 2000 - Cognition 76 (2):B35-B43.
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  20.  85
    Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to Categories.Shelbie L. Sutherland, Andrei Cimpian, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan A. Gelman - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (5):1021-1046.
    Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal (...)
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  21.  55
    A cross-linguistic comparison of generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin.Susan A. Gelman & Twila Tardif - 1998 - Cognition 66 (3):215-248.
    Generic noun phrases (e.g. 'bats live in caves') provide a window onto human concepts. They refer to categories as 'kinds rather than as sets of individuals. Although kind concepts are often assumed to be universal, generic expression varies considerably across languages. For example, marking of generics is less obligatory and overt in Mandarin than in English. How do universal conceptual biases interact with language-specific differences in how generics are conveyed? In three studies, we examined adults' generics in English and Mandarin (...)
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  22.  29
    Preschoolers’ use of spatiotemporal history, appearance, and proper name in determining individual identity.Grant Gutheil, Susan A. Gelman, Eileen Klein, Katherine Michos & Kara Kelaita - 2008 - Cognition 107 (1):366-380.
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  23.  66
    Differences in preschoolers’ and adults’ use of generics about novel animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide.Amanda C. Brandone & Susan A. Gelman - 2009 - Cognition 110 (1):1-22.
    Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants’ generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2 and 3: matched pairs of maximally similar, novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, the (...)
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  24.  32
    Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Hand-Written Beatles Lyrics: Adults' Evaluations of Authentic Objects.Brandy Frazier, Susan Gelman, Bruce Hood & Alice Wilson - 2009 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (1-2):1-14.
    Authentic objects are those that have a historical link to a person, event, time, or place of some significance. The current study examines everyday beliefs about authentic objects, with three primary goals: to determine the scope of adults' evaluation of authentic objects, to examine such evaluation in two distinct cultural settings, and to determine whether a person's attachment history predicts evaluation of authentic objects. We found that college students in the UK and the USA consistently evaluate a broad range of (...)
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  25. Scientific and Folk Theories of Viral Transmission: A Comparison of COVID-19 and the Common Cold.Danielle Labotka & Susan A. Gelman - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Disease transmission is a fruitful domain in which to examine how scientific and folk theories interrelate, given laypeople’s access to multiple sources of information to explain events of personal significance. The current paper reports an in-depth survey of U.S. adults’ causal reasoning about two viral illnesses: a novel, deadly disease that has massively disrupted everyone’s lives, and a familiar, innocuous disease that has essentially no serious consequences. Participants received a series of closed-ended and open-ended questions probing their reasoning about disease (...)
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  26.  31
    The role of preschoolers’ social understanding in evaluating the informativeness of causal interventions.Tamar Kushnir, Henry M. Wellman & Susan A. Gelman - 2008 - Cognition 107 (3):1084-1092.
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  27.  27
    Children’s and Adults’ Intuitions about Who Can Own Things.Nicholaus S. Noles, Frank C. Keil, Susan A. Gelman & Paul Bloom - 2012 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 12 (3-4):265-286.
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  28.  31
    You Get What You Need: An Examination of Purpose‐Based Inheritance Reasoning in Undergraduates, Preschoolers, and Biological Experts.Elizabeth A. Ware & Susan A. Gelman - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (2):197-243.
    This set of seven experiments examines reasoning about the inheritance and acquisition of physical properties in preschoolers, undergraduates, and biology experts. Participants (N = 390) received adoption vignettes in which a baby animal was born to one parent but raised by a biologically unrelated parent, and they judged whether the offspring would have the same property as the birth or rearing parent. For each vignette, the animal parents had contrasting values on a physical property dimension (e.g., the birth parent had (...)
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  29.  47
    My Heart Made Me Do It: Children's Essentialist Beliefs About Heart Transplants.Meredith Meyer, Susan A. Gelman, Steven O. Roberts & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (6):1694-1712.
    Psychological essentialism is a folk theory characterized by the belief that a causal internal essence or force gives rise to the common outward behaviors or attributes of a category's members. In two studies, we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-old children evidenced essentialist reasoning about heart transplants by asking them to predict whether trading hearts with an individual would cause them to take on the donor's attributes. Control conditions asked children to consider the effects of trading money with an individual. Results (...)
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  30.  69
    Tracking the Actions and Possessions of Agents.Susan A. Gelman, Nicholaus S. Noles & Sarah Stilwell - 2014 - Topics in Cognitive Science 6 (4):599-614.
    We propose that there is a powerful human disposition to track the actions and possessions of agents. In two experiments, 3-year-olds and adults viewed sets of objects, learned a new fact about one of the objects in each set , and were queried about either the taught fact or an unrelated dimension immediately after a spatiotemporal transformation, and after a delay. Adults uniformly tracked object identity under all conditions, whereas children tracked identity more when taught ownership versus labeling information, and (...)
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  31.  72
    Dirty Money: The Role of Moral History in Economic Judgments.Arber Tasimi & Susan A. Gelman - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S3):523-544.
    Although traditional economic models posit that money is fungible, psychological research abounds with examples that deviate from this assumption. Across eight experiments, we provide evidence that people construe physical currency as carrying traces of its moral history. In Experiments 1 and 2, people report being less likely to want money with negative moral history. Experiments 3–5 provide evidence against an alternative account that people's judgments merely reflect beliefs about the consequences of accepting stolen money rather than moral sensitivity. Experiment 6 (...)
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  32.  47
    Expressing generic concepts with and without a language model.Susan Goldin-Meadow, Susan A. Gelman & Carolyn Mylander - 2005 - Cognition 96 (2):109-126.
  33.  56
    A Dollar Is a Dollar Is a Dollar, or Is It? Insights From Children's Reasoning About “Dirty Money”.Arber Tasimi & Susan A. Gelman - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (4):e12950.
    Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (e.g., (...)
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  34.  34
    Young children’s preference for unique owned objects.Susan A. Gelman & Natalie S. Davidson - 2016 - Cognition 155 (C):146-154.
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  35.  29
    Sample diversity and premise typicality in inductive reasoning: Evidence for developmental change.Marjorie Rhodes, Daniel Brickman & Susan A. Gelman - 2008 - Cognition 108 (2):543-556.
  36.  37
    What we would (but shouldn't) do for those we love: Universalism versus partiality in responding to others' moral transgressions.Laura K. Soter, Martha K. Berg, Susan A. Gelman & Ethan Kross - 2021 - Cognition 217 (C):104886.
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  37.  64
    Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction.Zoe Finiasz, Susan A. Gelman & Tamar Kushnir - 2024 - Cognition 244 (C):105707.
  38.  35
    History and essence in human cognition.Susan A. Gelman, Meredith A. Meyer & Nicholaus S. Noles - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2):142-143.
    Bullot & Reber (B&R) provide compelling evidence that sensitivity to context, history, and design stance are crucial to theories of art appreciation. We ask how these ideas relate to broader aspects of human cognition. Further open questions concern how psychological essentialism contributes to art appreciation and how essentialism regarding created artifacts (such as art) differs from essentialism in other domains.
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  39.  24
    Different kinds of concepts and different kinds of words: What words do for human cognition.Sandra Waxman & Susan Gelman - 2010 - In Denis Mareschal, Paul Quinn & Stephen E. G. Lea (eds.), The Making of Human Concepts. Oxford University Press. pp. 101--130.
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  40.  5
    Developing Concepts of Authenticity: Insights From Parents’ and Children's Conversations About Historical Significance.Shaylene E. Nancekivell, Sarah Stilwell & Susan A. Gelman - 2024 - Cognitive Science 48 (10):e70000.
    The present study investigated children's understanding that an object's history may increase its significance, an appreciation that underpins the concept of historical authenticity (i.e., the idea that an item's history determines its true identity, beyond its functional or material qualities, leading people to value real items over copies or fakes). We examined the development of historical significance through the lens of parent–child conversations, and children's performance on an authenticity assessment. The final sample was American, 79.2% monoracial White, and mid-high socio-economic (...)
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  41.  26
    What makes Voldemort tick? Children's and adults' reasoning about the nature of villains.Valerie A. Umscheid, Craig E. Smith, Felix Warneken, Susan A. Gelman & Henry M. Wellman - 2023 - Cognition 233 (C):105357.
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  42.  36
    Children's reasoning about physics within and across ontological kinds.Gail D. Heyman, Ann T. Phillips & Susan A. Gelman - 2003 - Cognition 89 (1):43-61.
  43.  3
    The role of exceptions in children's and adults' judgments about generic statements.Ella Simmons & Susan A. Gelman - 2025 - Cognition 255 (C):106016.
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  44.  18
    Testing the effects of congruence in adult multilingual acquisition with implications for creole genesis.Danielle Labotka, Emily Sabo, Rawan Bonais, Susan A. Gelman & Marlyse Baptista - 2023 - Cognition 235 (C):105387.
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  45.  16
    “It kinda has like a mind”: Children's and parents' beliefs concerning viral disease transmission for COVID-19 and the common cold.Danielle Labotka & Susan A. Gelman - 2023 - Cognition 235 (C):105413.
  46.  14
    How does “emporiophobia” develop?Margaret Echelbarger, Susan A. Gelman & Charles W. Kalish - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
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  47.  28
    A Slippery Myth: How Learning Style Beliefs Shape Reasoning about Multimodal Instruction and Related Scientific Evidence.Shaylene E. Nancekivell, Xin Sun, Susan A. Gelman & Priti Shah - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (10):e13047.
    The learning style myth is a commonly held myth that matching instruction to a student's “learning style” will result in improved learning, while providing mismatched instruction will result in suboptimal learning. The present study used a short online reasoning exercise about the efficacy of multimodal instruction to investigate the nature of learning styles beliefs. We aimed to: understand how learning style beliefs interact with beliefs about multimodal learning; characterize the potential complexity of learning style beliefs and understand how this short (...)
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  48.  31
    Defining essentialism.Susan A. Gelman - 2004 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (9):404-409.
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  49.  40
    Two insights about naming in the preschool child.Susan A. Gelman - 2005 - In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York, US: Oxford University Press on Demand. pp. 198--215.
    This chapter examines associationist models of cognitive development, focusing on the development of naming in young children — the process by which young children learn of construct the meanings of words and concepts. It presents two early-emerging insights that children possess about the nature of naming. These insights are: essentialism: certain words map onto nonobvious, underlying causal features, and genericity: certain expressions map onto generic kinds as opposed to particular instances. The chapter discusses empirical studies with preschool children to support (...)
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  50.  1
    Mind-Body Dualism, Health, and Well-being in University Students.C. M. McGhee, Susan A. Gelman & Abigail J. Stewart - 2024 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 24 (5):436-465.
    Mind-body dualism conceptualizes mind and body as distinct, but there are different ways that dualism may be instantiated. In this study, we examined how Hierarchical Dualism (the belief that mind and body are distinct, and the mind is superior) and Mutual-Influence Dualism (the belief that mind and body are separate but interrelate) related to health behaviors and mental health in three student samples: exclusively queer, exclusively straight, and a mixed university subject pool (N = 535). Participants in each sample endorsed (...)
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