Graded structure Flashcards
Lecture 15
Why do we care about ‘graded structure’?
Because people agree that some things are better examples of stuff than other things, and this turns out to be important to people.
Graded structure in cognitive psychology
People see some members of a category as better/more typical examples of the category than others.
So, category members vary on a continuum re. how good/typical they are as examples of their category.
Rosch (1975) showed:
- Being asked how good/typical something is of its category turns out to be meaningful thing to ask.
- People overwhelmingly agree about these sort of rankings.
Graded structure is universal:
Barsalou (1987) - because every category observed so far has been found to have graded structure, it appears that graded structure is a universal property of categories.
Family resemblance:
Members of categories share lots of features (hair colour, nose size, etc.)
But no one member has all the common features.
Prototype
Prototype = an abstract composite of the shared features.
Strong advocates of the prototype approach believe:
- categorisation is all about abstracting common features from examples (prototypes).
- Categorisation occurs via this process (central tendency).
Critique 1: prototype vs examplar
Some disagree its about abstracting common features and argue its instead:
- Simply matching new examples to existing ‘exemplars’ in the category.
Categorisation = comparison to real member examples.
No abstracting activity needed.
This is the ‘exemplar’ approach.
Critique 2: central tendency?
The prototype approach is all about ‘central tendency’.
Many exemplar approaches are also about central tendency.
But some categorisation seems to be about ideals instead.
How near new example is to the ideal example.
- Ideals tend to be extreme values that are either true of only a few category members or true of none at all. Instead of lying at the centre of categories (as does central tendency), they generally lie at the periphery.
Graded structure in goal-derived categories (Barsalou, 1985)
One of the earliest ‘social’ applications of graded structure.
Goal derived categories:
- Things to pack in suitcase.
- Christmas presents.
- Things not to eat on a diet.
Instead of categorising items by shared physical or functional attributes, goal-derived categories are formed based on their relevance to achieving a specific goal.
Interesting as:
- dynamic: categories aren’t fixed, they change based on the goal or context.
- Evaluation: when someone suggests an item for a goal, we instantly evaluate it based on how well it fits the requirements of that goal.
- Judgement: we are not just deciding if an item is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the category, we’re making nauced judgements about its fit.
Graded structure and crime prototypes (Smith, 1991)
Graded structure/prototype interest in understand social categorisation of crime.
Smith asked participants ‘What are the features and attributes you feel are common to the crime below?’ (either burglary or kidnapping).
Found that participants prototype did not match the legal definition for either crime.
Matters because:
- Jurors may be using prototypes to judge crimes.
- May use these more than what the judge tells them about the law.
- Other researchers have also found this for sexual harrassment.
Graded structure in sexual definitions
Research into how people define sex.
Always almost used to treat sexual definitions in black and white, would ask if ‘is is’ vs ‘isn’t is’:
- Sex.
- Something that results in virginity loss.
- Cheating.
- Sexual harassment.
- Anstinence.
Horowitz looked at sex through the graded strcuture approach.
Horowitz and Spicer (2013): study explored people’s judgements about what activities they consider to be sex.
Horowitz and bedford (2017): study expanded on earlier work to include virginity loss.
Graded structure in social categories
Social psychology ‘imported’ graded structure from cognitive psychology and found that what heppens there for non-social categories, also happens for social categories.
