Analogical reasoning allows humans to make inferences about novel experiences and transfer learning across contexts.There is substantial literature on how analogical reasoning develops, but less is known about how children understand acommon use of analogyargument by analogy. Considering the importance argument by analogy plays in politics and thelaw, we examined the developmental trajectory of the ability to understand arguments by analogy. We measured childrens(N = 128, ages 3-12 years old) performance on a commonly used analogical reasoning task (i.e., a picture-mapping task;see Richland et al., 2006) and their understanding of arguments by analogy. We found that at age 4, children have asmuch difficulty understanding arguments by analogy as they do performing a picture-mapping task. However, by age five,childrens performance improves more rapidly in an argument by analogy task compared to a picture-mapping task.

Syntactic cues can lead people to infer trait-like qualities about novel agents (Gelman & Heyman, 1999). When anagent is described with a novel label, for instance, as a carrot-eater, children and adults are more likely to think that theagent has an enduring trait compared to an agent described as eating carrots all the time. Although novel labels mayinfluence peoples trait inferences in this way, it is less clear this effect would hold for more familiar, real-life descriptions.Here, we examined whether linguistic cues (i.e., noun vs. verb forms) influence peoples beliefs about lasting stabilityof symptoms associated with clinical disorders. Specifically, we examined whether describing a person as, for instance,having depression vs. feeling extremely depressed, would affect participants inferences about the stability of that personsdepression. We observed no effect of syntactic form on trait inferences. We discuss the implications of this work forpsychological science.

Misinformation promoting scientific misconceptions can spread rapidly in ways it once couldn’t, and discussions of thistrend now appear to shape nearly all discourse about polarizing topics (e.g., politics, science denial). What effects mightthis recent trend have on peoples intuitive theories of how others learn and assimilate new evidence? Furthermore, howdo these theories shape engagement in discussion of polarizing issues? To shed light on these questions, we conducteda series of exploratory studies (Experiments = 4; N = 1176) which demonstrate two key results. First, people do notthink that misinformation is more likely to influence people’s beliefs than accurate statistical information, contrary to ourpredictions. Second, and importantly, we found that the more likely someone is to say information (whether accurateor inaccurate) can change other peoples beliefs, the more likely they are to debate important social issues in an effort tocorrect their misconceptions.

Conspiracy theories are “alternative” explanations ofwell-understood events or phenomena. What makes themattractive explanations to so many people? We investigatewhether people ascribe characteristics typical of goodexplanations to conspiracy theories and whether they areperceived as more appealing explanations when they arearticulated as a refutation of the official version of events. Intwo experiments, participants read explanations of fourconspiracy theories and rated them along six dimensions ofexplanatory quality. We find that some explanatory virtues areascribed to conspiracy theories even by people who do notbelieve the conspiracy. Contrary to our predictions, we alsofind that framing a conspiracy as a refutation did not generallyelicit higher ascriptions of explanatory virtues. These resultssuggest that explanatory considerations may play a morecentral role in conspiracist beliefs than was previously thought.

Within internet there exists the 90-9-1 principle (also called the 1% rule), which dictates that a vast majority of user-generated content in any specific community comes from the top 1% active users, with most people only listening in. When combined with other demographic biases among social media users, this casts doubt as to how well these users represent the wider world, which might be problematic considering how user-generated content is used in psychological research and in the wider media. We conduct three computational studies using pre-existing datasets from Reddit and Twitter; we examine the accuracy of the 1% rule and what effect this might have on how user-generated content is perceived by performing and comparing sentiment analyses between user groups. Our findings support the accuracy of the 1% rule, and we report a bias in sentiments between low- and high-frequency users. Limitations of our analyses will be discussed.

People’s expectations play an important role in their evalua-tions and reactions to events. There is often disappointmentwhen events fail to meet expectations—sometimes even whenthe events are still positive overall—and there is a special thrillto having one’s expectations exceeded. In four studies, weexamined how expectations influence people’s judgments ofevents where another person or people were harmed. Partici-pants judged pairs of events where a victim experienced a sim-ilar harm, but where victims were at different prior risk of be-ing harmed. We found that people judged these events as beingworse when they were less expected–that is, when the victimswere initially at lower risk of being harmed. We argue that thisbias has pernicious moral consequences.

Conditionals are statements of the form ”If P, Then Q”. Reasoning about conditionals is a core component of humancognition. However, studies of how adults and children interpret and use conditionals have highlighted discrepancies be-tween human reasoning and logic inference rules. Recently, Douven and Verbrugge (2010) have found that a classificationof conditionals based on the type of inferential connection between the antecedent and the consequent (e.g., deductive,inductive and abductive conditionals) allowed for a finer analysis of adult conditional reasoning. Do these findings ex-tend to child conditional reasoning? We report a study (N=200, ages 4 to 11) that examines how performance in modusponens and modus tollens tasks depends on the type of conditional embedded in the argument. These results will shedlight on how the development of conditional reasoning in children is sensitive to the nature of the inferential relationshipof conditionals.

The idea that morality depends on God is an intuitive and widely held lay belief. Does this belief affect peoples intuitionsabout foundational moral claims (e.g., it ismorally wrong to kill someone just for fun)? Here, we discuss data acrossmultiple studies which investigate how considering Gods omnipotence may affect peoplesintuitions about basic moralclaims. Our evidence suggests that people think it is impossible to alter foundational moral truthsthat is, it is impossiblefor moral wrongs to ever be right and for moral rights to be wrong. Yet, people also maintain thatGodcould changethetruth-values of these same propositions, regardless of their own religious views. We discuss the implications of thisinconsistency both in peoples moral beliefs and in underlying cognitive mechanisms.

What cognitive processes underlie scientific explanation? Although scientific reasoning is often careful and methodical, we hypothesize that it is also influenced by an intuitive explanatory process: namely, an inherence heuristic (Cimpian & Salomon, 2014, BBS). The central claim of the inherence heuristic proposal is that, when people construct explanations, they oversample inherent facts about the entities whose behavior they are attempting to explain. We investigated the influence of this heuristic process on explanations for novel and historical scientific phenomena in chemistry, biology, and physics. Participants were provided with short vignettes describing unexpected outcomes of experiments and were asked to explain these outcomes. As predicted, explanations were couched primarily in terms of inherent features of the entities involved. Importantly, this was so even though such features were not mentioned in the vignettes but extrinsic factors were (e.g., high altitude, unusual location). These findings elucidate the psychological processes that underlie scientific explanation.