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While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs may nonetheless leak out in subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that convey information about expectations. Across 3 experiments with adults and children (ages 4-9), we compare permissive responses ("Sure, you can have that one") that vary the presence of surprisal cues (interjections "oh!" and disfluencies "um"). In Experiment 1 (n = 120), children by 6-to-7 use surprisal reactions to infer that a boy more likely made a counter-stereotypical choice. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that these cues are sufficient for children (n = 120) and adults (n = 80) to learn a novel expectation about a group of aliens. In Experiment 3, adults (n = 150) use the distribution of surprisal information to infer whether a novel behavior is gender-stereotyped. Across these experiments, we see emerging evidence that conversational feedback may provide a crucial and unappreciated avenue for the transmission of social beliefs.
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People Have Systematically Different Ownership Intuitions in Seemingly Simple Cases
Our understanding of ownership influences how we interact with objects and with each other. Here, we studied people’s intuitions about ownership transfer using a set of simple, parametrically varied events. We found that people ( N = 120 U.S. adults) had similar intuitions about ownership for some events but sharply opposing intuitions for others (Experiment 1). People ( N = 120 U.S. adults) were unaware of these conflicts and overestimated ownership consensus (Experiment 2). Moreover, differences in people’s ownership intuitions predicted their intuitions about the acceptability of using, altering, controlling, and destroying the owned object ( N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 3), even when ownership was not explicitly mentioned ( N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 4). Subject-level analyses suggest that these disagreements reflect at least two underlying intuitive theories, one in which intentions are central to ownership and another in which physical possession is prioritized.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2045778
- PAR ID:
- 10507051
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 0956-7976
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 858-871
- Size(s):
- p. 858-871
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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