Accession Number:
ADA618912
Title:
Latent Scope Bias in Categorization
Descriptive Note:
Journal article
Corporate Author:
NAVAL RESEARCH LAB WASHINGTON DC NAVY CENTER FOR APPLIED RESEARCH IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Personal Author(s):
Report Date:
2014-01-01
Pagination or Media Count:
9.0
Abstract:
Categories often have unobservable diagnostic features. For example, if a person is a lawyer, one might expect him to be both well dressed and knowledgeable about the law. However, without observing the person in a courtroom, one cannot tell whether or not he is knowledgeable about the law. How might we categorize the well-dressed person before we know whether or not he possesses a particular category feature Two studies showed that, all else equal, individuals prefer to group exemplars into categories that specify fewer unobserved and unobservable features--i.e., those that have a narrower latent scope--to those with a broader latent scope. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to classify novel exemplars as part of a social category that had a narrower latent scope in a verbal task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the scope bias generalizes to contexts in which category structure is never explicitly specified.
Descriptors:
Subject Categories:
- Sociology and Law
- Psychology