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Papers on Concepts and Generics
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[pdf] Donovan, B. M., Syed, A., Arnold, S. H., Lee, D., Weindling, M., Stuhlsatz, M. A. M., Riegle-Crumb, C., & Cimpian, A. (2024). Sex and gender essentialism in textbooks. Science, 383(6685), 822–825. 

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[pdf] Block, K., Gonzalez, A. M., Hall, C. E., Cimpian, A., Schmader, T., & Baron, A. S. (in press). Who cares about caring? Gender stereotypes about communal values emerge early and predict boys’ prosocial preferences​. Developmental Psychology. 

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[pdf] Christy, A. G., Maffly-Kipp, J., Friedman, M., Cimpian, A., & Schlegel, R. J. (2024). Essentialist beliefs about the self predict psychological wellbeing. Self and Identity, 23(1–2), 127–174. 

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[pdf] Bailey, A. H., Dembroff, R., Wodak, D., Ikizer, E. G., & Cimpian, A. (2024). People’s beliefs about pronouns reflect both the language they speak and their ideologies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(5), 1388–1406.

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[pdf] Bailey, A. H., Williams, A., Poddar, A., & Cimpian, A. (in press). Intersectional male-centric and White-centric biases in collective concepts. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

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[pdf] Muradoglu, M., Marchak, K., Gelman, S. A., & Cimpian, A. (2022). Formal explanations shape children’s representations of animal kinds and social groups. Developmental Psychology, 58, 2322–2335.

 

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[pdf] Zhao, S., Setoh, P., Storage, D., & Cimpian, A. (2022). The acquisition of the gender-brilliance stereotype: Age trajectory, relation to parents’ stereotypes, and intersections with race/ethnicity. Child Development, 93, e581–e597.

 

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[pdf] *Bailey, A. H., *Williams, A., & Cimpian, A. (2022). Based on billions of words on the internet, PEOPLE = MEN. Science Advances, 8, eabm2463.

 

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[pdf] Bian, L., & Cimpian, A. (2021). Generics about categories and generics about individuals: Same phenomenon or different? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(11), 1836–1855.

 

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[pdf] Valtonen, J., Ahn, W., & Cimpian, A. (2021). Neurodualism: People assume that the brain affects the mind more than the mind affects the brain. Cognitive Science, 45(9), e13034.

 

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[pdf] Siddiqui, H., Cimpian, A., & Rutherford, M. D. (2020). Canadian children’s concepts of national groups: A comparison with children from the United States. Developmental Psychology, 56(11), 2102–2109.   

 

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[pdf] Storage, D., Charlesworth, T. E. S., Banaji, M. R., & Cimpian, A. (2020). Adults and children implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 90, 104020.   

 

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[pdf] Vial, A. C., & Cimpian, A. (2020). Evaluative feedback expresses and reinforces cultural stereotypes. In E. Brummelman (Ed.), Psychological Perspectives on Praise (pp. 119–128). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

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[pdf] Foster-Hanson, E., Cimpian, A., Leshin, R. A., & Rhodes, M. (2020). Asking children to “be helpers” can backfire after setbacks. Child Development, 91(1), 236–248. 

 

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[pdf] *Jaxon, J., *Lei, R. F., Shachnai, R., Chestnut, E. K., & Cimpian, A. (2019). The acquisition of gender stereotypes about intellectual ability: Intersections with race. Journal of Social Issues, 75(4), 1192–2015. 

 

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[pdf] Horne, Z., & Cimpian, A. (2019). Intuitions about personal identity are rooted in essentialist thinking across development. Cognition, 191, 103981. 

 

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[pdf] Christy, A. G., Schlegel, R. J., & Cimpian, A. (2019). Why do people believe in a “true self”? The role of essentialist reasoning about personal identity and the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(2), 386–416. 

 

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[pdf] Hussak, L. J., & Cimpian, A. (2019). “It feels like it’s in your body”: How children in the United States think about nationality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(7), 1153–1168. 

 

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[pdf] Sutherland, S. L., & Cimpian, A. (2019). Developmental evidence for a link between the inherence bias in explanation and psychological essentialism. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 177, 265–281. 

 

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[pdf] Gelman, S. A., Cimpian, A., & Roberts, S. O. (2018). How deep do we dig? Formal explanations as placeholders for inherent explanations. Cognitive Psychology, 106, 43–59. 

 

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[pdf] Horne, Z., & Cimpian, A. (2018). Subtle syntactic cues affect intuitions about knowledge: Methodological and theoretical implications. In T. Lombrozo, J. Knobe, & S. Nichols (Eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Vol. 2 (pp. 7–37). New York: Oxford University Press.

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[pdf] Rhodes, M., Leslie, S. J., Saunders, K., Dunham, Y., & Cimpian, A. (2018). How does social essentialism affect the development of inter-group relations? Developmental Science, 21, e12509.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., Hammond, M. D., Mazza, G., & Corry, G. (2017). Young children’s self-concepts include representations of abstract traits and the global self. Child Development, 88(6), 1786–1798. 

 

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[pdf] Tasimi, A., Gelman, S. A., Cimpian, A., & Knobe, J. (2017). Differences in the evaluation of generic statements about human and non-human categories. Cognitive Science, 41(7), 1934–1957.

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[pdf] Hammond, M. D., & Cimpian, A. (2017). Investigating the cognitive structure of stereotypes: Generic beliefs about groups predict social judgments better than statistical beliefs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(5), 607–614. 

 

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[pdf] Cimpian, A. (2017). Early reasoning about competence is not irrationally optimistic, nor does it stem from inadequate cognitive representations. In A. J. Elliot, C. S. Dweck, & D. S. Yeager (Eds.), Handbook of Competence and Motivation (2nd Edition): Theory and Application (pp. 387–407). New York: Guilford Press.

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[pdf] Bian, L., & Cimpian, A. (2017). Are stereotypes accurate? A perspective from the cognitive science of concepts. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e3. [commentary]​

  

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[pdf] Sutherland, S. L., & Cimpian, A. (2017). Inductive generalization relies on category representations. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(2), 632–636.

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[pdf] Qu, Y., Pomerantz, E. M., Wang, M., Cheung, C., & Cimpian, A. (2016). Conceptions of adolescence: Implications for differences in engagement in school over early adolescence in the United States and China. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45(7), 1512–1526.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A. (2016). The privileged status of category representations in early development. Child Development Perspectives, 10(2), 99–104.

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[pdf] Sutherland, S. L., & Cimpian, A. (2015). Children show heightened knew-it-all-along errors when learning new facts about kinds: Evidence for the power of kind representations in children’s thinking. Developmental Psychology, 51(8), 1115–1130.

 

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[pdf] Sutherland, S. L., Cimpian, A., Leslie, S. J., & Gelman, S. A. (2015). Memory errors reveal a bias to spontaneously generalize to categories. Cognitive Science, 39(5), 1021–1046.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Salomon, E. (2014). The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(5), 461–480. [target article]

 

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Salomon, E. (2014). Refining and expanding the proposal of an inherence heuristic in human understanding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(5), 506–527. [response to commentaries]

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[pdf] Salomon, E., & Cimpian, A. (2014). The inherence heuristic as a source of essentialist thought. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(10), 1297–1315.

 

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Petro, G. (2014). Building theory-based concepts: Four-year-olds preferentially seek explanations for features of kinds. Cognition, 131(2), 300–310.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Park, J. J. (2014). Tell me about pangolins! Evidence that children are motivated to learn about kinds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 46–55. 

 

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[pdf] Cimpian, A. (2013). Generic statements, causal attributions, and children’s naive theories. In M. R. Banaji & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Navigating the Social World: What infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 269–274). New York: Oxford University Press.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., Mu, Y., & Erickson, L. C. (2012). Who is good at this game? Linking an activity to a social category undermines children’s achievement. Psychological Science, 23(5), 533–541. 

 

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Scott, R. M. (2012). Children expect generic knowledge to be widely shared. Cognition, 123(3), 419–433.

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[pdf] Brandone, A. C., Cimpian, A., Leslie, S. J., & Gelman, S. A. (2012). Do lions have manes? For children, generics are about kinds rather than quantities. Child Development, 83(2), 423–433.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Erickson, L. C. (2012). Remembering kinds: New evidence that categories are privileged in children’s thinking. Cognitive Psychology, 64(3), 161–185.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Erickson, L. C. (2012). The effect of generic statements on children’s causal attributions: Questions of mechanism. Developmental Psychology, 48(1), 159–170.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., Meltzer, T. J., & Markman, E. M. (2011). Preschoolers’ use of morphosyntactic cues to identify generic sentences: Indefinite singular noun phrases, tense, and aspect. Child Development, 82(5), 1561–1578.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Markman, E. M. (2011). The generic/nongeneric distinction influences how children interpret new information about social others. Child Development, 82(2), 471–492.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2010). Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications. Cognitive Science, 34(8), 1452–1482. 

 

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[pdf] Cimpian, A. (2010). The impact of generic language about ability on children’s achievement motivation. Developmental Psychology, 46(5), 1333–1340.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Cadena, C. (2010). Why are dunkels sticky? Preschoolers infer functionality and intentional creation for artifact properties learned from generic language. Cognition, 117(1), 62–68.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., Gelman, S. A., & Brandone, A. C. (2010). Theory-based considerations influence the interpretation of generic sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(2), 261–276.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Markman, E. M. (2009). Information learned from generic language becomes central to children’s biological concepts: Evidence from their open-ended explanations. Cognition, 113(1), 14–25.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Markman, E. M. (2008). Preschool children’s use of cues to generic meaning. Cognition, 107(1), 19–53.

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., Arce, H. C., Markman, E. M., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Subtle linguistic cues affect children’s motivation. Psychological Science, 18(4), 314–316. 

 

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[pdf] Cimpian, A., & Markman, E. M. (2005). The absence of a shape bias in children’s word learning. Developmental Psychology, 41(6), 1003–1019.

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Our research is
supported by:

Institute of Education Sciences
National Science Foundation
National Institutes of Health
Spencer Foundation
Templeton Foundation
Mattel
Student Experience Research Network

Our research
partners include:

Brooklyn Children's Museum
Wildlife Conservation Society
NYC Department of Education
DiMenna Children's History Museum

The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute of Education Sciences or the U.S. Department of Education.

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