Abstract
Identifying projectable predicates is a key issue in understanding inductive inference. It is proposed that looking into the evolutionary psychology literature for adaptive properties may be one useful approach. One hypothesis that emerges from this literature is that properties that signal danger or harm should be more salient than properties that do not. Two studies are carried out to test this hypothesis. In study 1 participants were presented with a scenario involving the discovery of novel animals, for which there was incomplete information. Three types of properties (a harmful property, a neutral property, a beneficial property) were associated with animals in one (base) category and participants were asked to indicate strength of generalization of the property to a target within the category, and to a target across to another category. In the second experiment, the procedure was repeated, but in addition, subjects were also explicitly asked to indicate whether the base and target belonged to the same or different categories. Study 1 showed that the harmful property was more projectable compared to the beneficial and neutral properties. Study 2 reconfirmed this and further showed that it also promoted excessive generalization across categories. The results suggest that examination of adaptations identified by evolutionary psychologists may be a useful source of insight in the study of inductive inference.
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Notes
The Chinese proverb of “一朝被蛇咬, 十年怕井绳” literally means “Once bitten by a snake, one shies at a coiled rope for the next ten years". Its English equivalent is "Once bitten, twice shy.”.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Project of China (Grant Number 2020YFC2007302), National Social Science Fund of China (Grant Number 18BSH120), the key research project of Academy for Multidisciplinary Studies, Capital Normal University (Grant Number JCKXYJY2019019). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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KJ and PPL designed the study, KJ ran the experiment and did the data analysis, PPL, KJ and VG explained the results, PPL, KJ and VG wrote the manuscript.
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Liang, P., Goel, V. & Jiang, K. Perceived danger associated with a property modulates cross category generalization. Cogn Neurodyn 16, 1273–1281 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-022-09793-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-022-09793-3