Beyond situational explanations: Structural thinking as a unique type of externalist thinking

• In Event: Advances in Social Cognition: Children’s Inferences in a Complex Social World

Abstract

Many strands of psychological research examine how people explain behavior, attributing it either to internal or external factors (Hussak & Cimpian, 2015; Ross & Nisbett, 2011). Internalist explanations (appealing to inherent, intrinsic, essential properties) are typically contrasted with external (situational) factors, with the latter category vaguely and variably defined. In practice, external explanations tend to involve local situational constraints that affect specific individuals (e.g., if a person has been forced to write an essay in favor of Castro, do they really support Castro?; Jones & Harris, 1967), or distant historical events (e.g., an externalist explanation of why “the Blarks have a lot more money than the Orps” stating that “Maybe the Blarks won a war, or found gold, or something else happened a long time ago.”; Hussak & Cimpian, 2015). However, recent work has introduced a special subtype of externalist reasoning: structural thinking (Vasilyeva, Gopnik, & Lombrozo, 2018; Vasilyeva & Lombrozo, 2020). Structural explanations restrict their focus to stable external constraints acting on a category in virtue of its stable position in a structure. For example, a structural explanation of why women often quit their jobs (or why Lisa quit her job) after having a child may cite the gender wage gap, limited parental leave, and other stable constraints acting on women in virtue of their position in the social structure in the US (Haslanger, 2015). But not every explanation citing situational factors is structural: if Lisa were forced to quit her job because her malevolent sister locked her up at home for a week, this would be an externalist, but not a structural explanation.

While structural thinking has been successfully contrasted with internalist thinking in prior research (Vasilyeva et al., 2018), and it has been distinguished from “merely externalist” thinking on theoretical grounds, no empirical work has demonstrated that structural and non-structural varieties of externalist thinking work differently in children. To address this gap, we compared the effects of structural and merely externalist explanations (citing non-systematic external influences) on several aspects of reasoning about social categories. Two-hundred-and-seventy-one 3-8-yr-olds learned that girls picked predominantly yellow fruit either because of stable structural constraints acting on girls (they’re assigned to picking fruit from the field bearing mainly yellow fruit), or because of a more transient and accidental external factor (they chased a bunny into yellow-fruit field, and ended up picking fruit there). The structural and “merely externalist” explanations produced very different patterns of responses: only under the structural construal did participants reliably generalize properties across category members, and they were significantly more likely to generate formal explanations (“they picked yellow fruit because they are girls”) and endorse generic claims about the category (“girls pick yellow fruit”). The structural explanation also primed interpretations of novel generics in non-essentialist terms more effectively than the merely externalist explanation did. These patterns were present early and became more pronounced with age. These findings highlight limitations of the classical dichotomy of internal vs. situational explanations, and invite a richer taxonomy of factors shaping social inference throughout development.

Authors

• Nadya Vasilyeva, Princeton University
  Presenting Author

• Alison Gopnik, University of California - Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tania Lombrozo, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author