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Generic Statements Require Little Evidence for Acceptance but Have Powerful Implications
Open accessAbstract
Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real‐world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse.
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“Past research found that generic sentences implied that a property was broadly true (28,35,45,46) and conceptually central (37,38), and that the category expressed was stable with inherent properties (41,47).”
From Generic language in scientific communication (2019) · cites this paper as [35]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredIn the citing paper
“Cimpian et al. ([2010]) found that while generic claims of the form 'Ps (for example, men) are f (for example, resist green behaviour)' are generally accepted on relatively weak evidence, when they are unfamiliar with P, study participants construed such claims strongly, as conveying that almost all Ps are f.”
From Science Communication and the Problematic Impact of Descriptive Norms (2023) · cites this paper as Cimpian et al. [2010]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Cimpian, A., Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A.
- Affiliations
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- University of Michigan (US)
- Corresponding author
- Cimpian, Andrei
- Venue
- Cognitive Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2010-08-18
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1452-1482
- ISSN
- 0364-0213 (ISSN-L)
- 1551-6709
- PMC
- PMC2992340
- OpenAlex
- W2102602565
- Cited by
- 209
- References
- 57
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 47 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 10.40
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Cognitive Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R56HD036043, R01HD036043)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
- Keywords
- generic statements, category generalization, sentence acceptability, stereotyping, political discourse
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