Genercis, Attitudes and Attitude Holders

World knowledge is often expressed, recalled, and acquired through generic statements, such as “birds fly” (Carlson, 2010; Gelman, 2010, Gelman & Roberts, 2017, Gelman, Goetz, Sarnecka, & Flukes, 2008, Graham, Nayer, & Gelman, 2011; Hollander, Gelman, & Star, 2002; Leslie, Khemlani, & Glucksberg, 2011). A large body of research has shown that both adults and children readily produce and comprehend generics and draw systematic inferences about kinds and their properties depending on whether information is framed generically or specifically. These findings have motivated a range of accounts, linking generic language to the formation and transmission of attitudes in the social domain, as well as to their negative downstream consequences such as stereotypes and prejudice (Rhodes, Leslie, & Tworek 2012; Berio, & Musholt, 2023). By contrast, much less is known about how people reason about holders of such attitudes in the social domain, particularly when they are expressed as generic statements. This is because existing work has primarily focused on how generics gives rise to generalizations about kinds, rather than on how generalizations may extend to attitude holders. The present study addresses this gap. We ask how generic language influences judgments about another person, by investigating whether changes in attitude are more readily linked to broader changes in a person’s personality.