Abstract
College student subjects responded to simple or conjunction social category labels (e.g., “mechanics” “female mechanics”) in two experiments. In the first experiment, they listed attributes that they believed described a typical member of the category and, in the second experiment, they rated the characteristics of typical members of the category on 15 trait-adjective rating scales. A large proportion of the subjects’ responses to conjunction categories in the attribute-listing task involved the production of emergent attributes that had not been mentioned for either of the ingredient categories. Similarly, a large proportion of trait-adjective ratings for the conjunction categories fell outside the bounds defined by the ratings of the simple ingredient categories. These two findings, along with the subjects’ retrospective explanations for their ratings, suggest that people frequently engage in a complex reasoning process in order to infer the attributes of a conjunction category that is defined by the intersection of two simple social categories. A process model is outlined to account for the subjects’ attribute-listing and rating responses.
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The authors would like to thank Thomas Ostrom, Nancy Pennington, Lance Rips, and Edward Smith for their valuable advice concerning this research. Support for the research was provided by NSF Grant BNS-8717259.
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Hastie, R., Schroeder, C. & Weber, R. Creating complex social conjunction categories from simple categories. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 28, 242–247 (1990). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334016
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334016