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People tend to judge what is typical as also good and appropriate-as what ought to be. What accounts for the prevalence of these judgments, given that their validity is at best uncertain? We hypothesized that the tendency to reason from "is" to "ought" is due in part to a systematic bias in people's (nonmoral) explanations, whereby regularities (e.g., giving roses on Valentine's Day) are explained predominantly via inherent or intrinsic facts (e.g., roses are beautiful). In turn, these inherence-biased explanations lead to value-laden downstream conclusions (e.g., it is good to give roses). Consistent with this proposal, results from five studies (N = 629 children and adults) suggested that, from an early age, the bias toward inherence in explanations fosters inferences that imbue observed reality with value. Given that explanations fundamentally determine how people understand the world, the bias toward inherence in these judgments is likely to exert substantial influence over sociomoral understanding., (© The Author(s) 2016.)

The mappings between the words of a language and their meanings are arbitrary. There is, for example, nothing inherently dog-like about the word dog. And yet, building on prior evidence (e.g., Brook, 1970; Piaget, 1967), the six studies reported here (N=1062) suggest that both children and (at least to some extent) adults see a special "fit" between objects and their names, as if names were particularly suitable or appropriate for the objects they denote. These studies also provide evidence for a novel proposal concerning the source of these nominal fit beliefs. Specifically, beliefs about nominal fit may be a byproduct of the heuristic processes that people use to make sense of the world more generally (Cimpian & Salomon, 2014a). In sum, the present studies provide new insights into how people conceive of language and demonstrate that these conceptions are rooted in the processes that underlie broader explanatory reasoning., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Ginther and Kahn claim that academics' beliefs about the importance of brilliance do not predict gender gaps in Ph.D. attainment beyond mathematics and verbal test scores. However, Ginther and Kahn's analyses are problematic, exhibiting more than 100 times the recommended collinearity thresholds. Multiple analyses that avoid this problem suggest that academics' beliefs are in fact uniquely predictive of gender gaps across academia., (Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women's underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.'s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans' underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses., (Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

The inherence heuristic is a basic cognitive process that supplies quick-and-easy answers to what are, in reality, incredibly complex questions about why the broad patterns of the world are as they are (Cimpian & Salomon, 2014-a, 2014-b). This explanatory heuristic satisfies the human need to understand, but it is also a source of bias because the heuristic relies too often on the (easily accessible) inherent features of the entities in the patterns being explained. Here, we investigated the developmental trajectory of this heuristic. Given that the cognitive resources that help override the typical output of the inherence heuristic are scarce in childhood, we hypothesized that the heuristic's output would be more broadly endorsed by children than by adults. Five experiments involving young children and adults (N=480) provided consistent support for this hypothesis. The first three experiments (Part I) investigated participants' explanations for broad patterns (e.g., fire trucks are red) and suggested that, consistent with our predictions, children were particularly likely to endorse inherence-based explanations. The last two experiments (Part II) investigated two intuitions that accompany the output of the inherence heuristic: namely, that the patterns being explained cannot be changed and are temporally stable. As predicted, participants' judgments on these dimensions showed the same developmental differences as the explanations investigated in Part I, with children being particularly likely to see patterns as inalterable and temporally stable. The developmental differences found across these five experiments suggest that children start out with a broad reliance on the explanatory output of the inherence heuristic, a reliance that narrows in scope to some extent as children develop., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Is the structure of human concepts continuous across development, or does it undergo qualitative transformations? Extensive evidence with adults has demonstrated that they are motivated to understand why categories have the features they do. To investigate whether young children display a similar motivation-an issue that bears on the question of continuity vs. transformation in conceptual structure-we conducted three studies involving 4-year-olds (N=90) and adults (N=124). Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that 4-year-olds indeed display a strong motivation to explain why categories have the features they do. Specifically, when provided with the option of asking "why?" about features of novel categories vs. features of individuals from other novel categories, children preferred to ask "why?" about the category features. Moreover, children's explanatory preference was specific to facts about categories per se and did not extend to facts that were merely presented in the context of multiple category instances. Experiment 3 also ruled out the possibility that the category facts were preferred because these facts were more surprising. In sum, these three studies reveal an early-emerging motivation to make sense of the categories encountered in the world and, more generally, speak to the richness of children's conceptual representations., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Children's achievement-related theories have a profound impact on their academic success. Children who adopt entity theories believe that their ability to perform a task is dictated by the amount of natural talent they possess for that task--a belief that has well-documented adverse consequences for their achievement (e.g., lowered persistence, impaired performance). It is thus important to understand what leads children to adopt entity theories. In the experiments reported here, we hypothesized that the mere act of linking success at an unfamiliar, challenging activity to a social group gives rise to entity beliefs that are so powerful as to interfere with children's ability to perform the activity. Two experiments showed that, as predicted, the performance of 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 192) was impaired by exposure to information that associated success in the task at hand with membership in a certain social group (e.g., "boys are good at this game"), regardless of whether the children themselves belonged to that group.