Generic generalizations within and across contexts

Ny Vasil

Assistant Professor

Psychology Department, California State University East Bay

Generic generalizations about natural and social kinds (e.g., “Raccoons have rabies”; “Trader Joe’s cashiers are friendly”) shape how agents learn, explain and intervene on their environment. Yet, there’s no consensus about what underwrites people’s endorsement of generic generalizations. This talk brings together ideas from psychology, philosophy and linguistics to argue that stability of the described relationship – the extent to which it holds across various contexts, real or hypothetical – plays an important role in people’s endorsement of generic generalizations about natural and social kinds, and about causal relationships in these domains. In a series of empirical studies, we explore how agents navigate the world composed of both broad and narrow patterns, how the search for robust non-accidental regularities is flexibly adapted to handle “sociocultural bubbles” and other exceptions to universality, and how this capacity develops. In conclusion, I will discuss how the proposed account coheres with the psychological functions of generalizations.