Language use plays a crucial role in the consensualization of stereotypes within cultural
groups. Based on an integrative review of the literature on stereotyping and biased …

Understanding how people explain is a core task for cognitive science. In this opinion article,
we argue that research on explanation would benefit from more engagement with how the …

Social essentialism entails the belief that certain social categories (eg, gender, race) mark
fundamentally distinct kinds of people. Essentialist beliefs have pernicious consequences …

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive
process that leads people to explain observed patterns (eg, girls wear pink) predominantly …

It is widely recognized that language plays a key role in the transmission of human culture,
but relatively little is known about the mechanisms by which language simultaneously …

Scientific communication poses a challenge: To clearly highlight key conclusions and
implications while fully acknowledging the limitations of the evidence. Although these goals …

American political parties continue to grow more polarized, but the extent of ideological
polarization among the public is much less than the extent of perceived polarization (what …

Generic statements (eg,“Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this
paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic …

People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often
referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true …

People often view their sociopolitical systems as fair and natural despite indisputable biases
in their structure. Current theories of this phenomenon trace its roots to a motivation to …