ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Use of troponins in the classification of myocardial infarction from electronic health records. The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study.International journal of cardiology · 2022Trial
- Social sampling: Children track social choices to reason about status hierarchies.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2021Trial
- Asking young children to "do science" instead of "be scientists" increases science engagement in a randomized field experiment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Trial
- Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- When Do Generics Feel Justifiable? A Registered Report Bridging Key Theories.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- The persuasive role of generic-you in online interactions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The Missing Half of Language Learning in Current Developmental Language Models: Exogenous and Endogenous Linguistic Input.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- The nature of label-induced categories: preverbal infants represent surface features and category symbols.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Cultural bias and cultural alignment of large language models.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Generically partisan: Polarization in political communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The language network is not engaged in object categorization.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Text as signal. A tutorial with case studies focusing on social media (Twitter).Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Article
- Should continuous deep sedation until death be legally regulated in Switzerland? An exploratory study with palliative care physicians.Palliative care and social practice · 2023Article
- The influence of linguistic form and causal explanations on the development of social essentialism.Cognition · 2022Article
- Context reconsidered: Complex signal ensembles, relational meaning, and population thinking in psychological science.The American psychologist · 2022Article
- A new science of emotion: implications for functional neurological disorder.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2022Review
- How children's media and teachers communicate exclusive and essentialist views of science and scientists.Developmental psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is widely recognized that language plays a key role in the transmission of human culture, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms by which language simultaneously encourages both cultural stability and cultural innovation. This paper examines this issue by focusing on the use of language to transmit categories, focusing on two universal devices: labels (e.g., shark, woman) and generics (e.g., "sharks attack swimmers"; "women are nurturing"). We propose that labels and generics each assume two key principles: norms and essentialism. The normative assumption permits transmission of category information with great fidelity, whereas essentialism invites innovation by means of an open-ended, placeholder structure. Additionally, we sketch out how labels and generics aid in conceptual alignment and the progressive "looping" between categories and cultural practices. In this way, human language is a technology that enhances and expands the categorization capacities that we share with other animals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.