Introduction Methods Results Discussion
Undergraduate Category: Social Sciences, Business and Law Abstract ID# 1840
Teaching Alien Concepts: Essentialist Speech in Explanations of Novel Concepts Reza Akhtar, Claire Margiatto, Emma Pitt, Dana Walker, Hannah Wilkins, Nicole Betz, John D. Coley Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education (CORE) Lab, Department of Psychology
Introduction Goal Using the facade of an alien scientist, we were able to have people teach familiar concepts to someone who did not already know what they were. Our goal was to study the kind of language they used when explaining these concepts. Hypothesis We expected participants to rely on psychological essentialism when explaining emotions, objects, natural (living) kinds, and social groups. We also examined the essentialism measures of naturalness and cohesiveness, which are commonly associated with social groups. Psychological Essentialism: the assumption that underlying “essences” produce overt features that dictate category membership Naturalness: the extent to which something is naturally occurring rather than artificially made Cohesiveness: how similar members of a group are to one another
Methods 48 Northeastern undergraduates were recruited through NU-PsyLink. Participants completed two tasks involving 40 items: 10 items from 4 target domains (i.e. living kinds, social categories, artifacts, and emotions). Task 1: Participants explained random subsets of the items to a fictitious extraterrestrial collaborator (“Dr. Flerb”) via Skype. These sessions were transcribed, divided into units of analysis based on linguistic rules, and analyzed for essentialism by a coding team. Analysis is ongoing. Sample Prompt: Dr. Flerb heard a person say that they saw a panda. He doesn’t understand what a panda is. Please describe a panda in a way that can help Dr. Flerb understand it.
Results Task 1
Task 2
Overall, the living kinds category ranked highest for essentialism (M=8.06, SD=1.03), followed by artifacts (M=6.91, SD=0.99), emotions (M=5.44, SD=0.87) and social categories (M=5.37, SD=0.89).
Essentialist “Pandas are known to be cute and harmless, and they eat bamboo.”
Non-Essentialist “Sometimes [pandas] live in zoos.” Sample Participant Responses
Pictured: Dr. Flerb, our fictitious alien collaborator and a scientist specializing in “Earth Science”
Task 2: Participants completed a standardized essentialism survey developed by Haslam and colleagues (2000). Based on the two factors of essentialism by Haslam, we computed cohesiveness and naturalness scores for each of the 4 categories.
Essentialism scores across categories, p
Teaching Alien Concepts: Essentialist Speech in Explanations of Novel Concepts Reza Akhtar, Claire Margiatto, Emma Pitt, Dana Walker, Hannah Wilkins, Nicole Betz, John D. Coley Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education (CORE) Lab, Department of Psychology
Introduction Goal Using the facade of an alien scientist, we were able to have people teach familiar concepts to someone who did not already know what they were. Our goal was to study the kind of language they used when explaining these concepts. Hypothesis We expected participants to rely on psychological essentialism when explaining emotions, objects, natural (living) kinds, and social groups. We also examined the essentialism measures of naturalness and cohesiveness, which are commonly associated with social groups. Psychological Essentialism: the assumption that underlying “essences” produce overt features that dictate category membership Naturalness: the extent to which something is naturally occurring rather than artificially made Cohesiveness: how similar members of a group are to one another
Methods 48 Northeastern undergraduates were recruited through NU-PsyLink. Participants completed two tasks involving 40 items: 10 items from 4 target domains (i.e. living kinds, social categories, artifacts, and emotions). Task 1: Participants explained random subsets of the items to a fictitious extraterrestrial collaborator (“Dr. Flerb”) via Skype. These sessions were transcribed, divided into units of analysis based on linguistic rules, and analyzed for essentialism by a coding team. Analysis is ongoing. Sample Prompt: Dr. Flerb heard a person say that they saw a panda. He doesn’t understand what a panda is. Please describe a panda in a way that can help Dr. Flerb understand it.
Results Task 1
Task 2
Overall, the living kinds category ranked highest for essentialism (M=8.06, SD=1.03), followed by artifacts (M=6.91, SD=0.99), emotions (M=5.44, SD=0.87) and social categories (M=5.37, SD=0.89).
Essentialist “Pandas are known to be cute and harmless, and they eat bamboo.”
Non-Essentialist “Sometimes [pandas] live in zoos.” Sample Participant Responses
Pictured: Dr. Flerb, our fictitious alien collaborator and a scientist specializing in “Earth Science”
Task 2: Participants completed a standardized essentialism survey developed by Haslam and colleagues (2000). Based on the two factors of essentialism by Haslam, we computed cohesiveness and naturalness scores for each of the 4 categories.
Essentialism scores across categories, p
