The stability of social categories

Author(s):  
Abraham Sesshu Roth
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 489-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan A. Gelman ◽  
Gail D. Heyman

This article examines how language affects children's inferences about novel social categories. We hypothesized that lexicalization (using a noun label to refer to someone who possesses a certain property) would influence children's inferences about other people. Specifically, we hypothesized that when a property is lexicalized, it is thought to be more stable over time and over contexts. One hundred fifteen children (5- and 7-year-olds) learned about a characteristic of a hypothetical person (e.g., “Rose eats a lot of carrots”). Half the children were told a noun label for each character (e.g., “She is a carrot-eater”), whereas half heard a verbal predicate (e.g., “She eats carrots whenever she can”). The children judged characteristics as significantly more stable over time and over contexts when the characteristics were referred to by a noun than when they were referred to by a verbal predicate. Lexicalization (in the form of a noun) provides important information to children regarding the stability of personal characteristics.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Peretz-Lange ◽  
Paul Muentener

Children hold rich essentialist beliefs about natural and social categories, representing them as discrete (mutually exclusive with sharp boundaries) and stable (with membership remaining constant over an individual’s lifespan). Children use essential categories to make inductive inferences about individuals. How do children determine what categories to consider essential and to use as an inductive base? Although much research has demonstrated children’s use of labels to form categories, here we explore whether children might also use the observed discreteness or stability of a trait to form categories based on that trait. In the present study, we taught children about novel creatures and provided them with a cue (discreteness, stability, labels, or no cue) to form texture categories rather than shape or color categories. Experiment 1 found that children (4–6 years, n = 140) used labels but not discreteness or stability cues to form texture categories more often than at baseline. Experiment 2 (5–6 years, n = 152) found that children who later recognized the stability and discreteness cues used them to form categories more often than those who did not later recognize the cues, but were still overall less likely to use these cues than to use labels cues. Results underscore the unique importance of labels as a cue for category formation and suggest that children do not readily rely on the stability and discreteness of a trait to form animate categories despite readily inferring that such categories are stable and discrete. Implications for natural and social category representations are discussed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 329-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Pattyn ◽  
Yves Rosseel ◽  
Alain Van Hiel

People readily use social categories in their daily interactions with others. Although many scholars have focused on social categorization, they have largely neglected the cognitive representation of stimuli as a basis of this process. The present work aims to determine what dimensions are commonly used to organize the social world. The main dimensions of the social mental map are extracted from sorting data pertaining to a wide variety of social stimuli. Dimensions reflecting conventionalism, age, gender, physical versus cognitive orientation, warmth, and deviance are revealed. Furthermore, we show important individual differences in the extent to which each of these dimensions are attended to. We also establish the stability and reliability of our findings in a follow-up and a replication study.


Res Publica ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Peter Castenmiller ◽  
Paul Dekker

In 1985 Cleymans showed in this journal that politica! participation in Belgium did not differ much from what was found in international research in other European countries. In this article some pieces of "conventional wisdom" in the international literature about structure and selectivity of political participation are questioned with Dutch data. Furthermore, information about participation in the Netherlands is important in itself. As neighbouring countries with close connections and interrelated histories, Belgium and Holland certainly deserve more attention as objects for comparative study.  In a range of ten activities from trying to contact politicians to joining a demonstration it seems to make less and less sense to look for a polarity of conventional and unconventional participation in the Netherlands. The overall political participation since 1973 appears to remain at the same level. This finding questions popular beliefs about shifts from a rebellious beginning of the seventies to a quiet period in the second half of that decade to spectacular outbursts of unconventional political behaviour at the beginning of the eighties (new social movements) and resulting in political apathy at the moment. On a macro-level the stability of participation seems to be combined with a constant or slowly rising passive political involvement. Political involvement and participation in the 1980'sare still related with individual and social background characteristics as education, sex, age, involvement in the Labour force and religion. However, relationships are not very strong in the 1980's. Following political participation of some social categories in the 1973-1986 period, it appeared that education and leftright-selfrating are of most and possibly still growing importance. Besides the higher educated and leftisht people, public employees are the "big participators" during all the years. Students evidently lose position. The gap between the sexes seems to disappear. Whereas in Belgium working outside the home does not seem to be a factor that stimulates the participation of wamen, in the Netherlands it seems to be of an utmost importance.It turns out that there are similarities and differences in political involvement and participation between Belgium and the Netherlands. Same differences may result from the fact that Cleymans used data of 1975, whereas we used data until 1986. It is clear, however, that there have been developments in the structure andselectivity of participation in the Netherlands and it would be interesting to have more recent comparative information about Belgium.


1982 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
pp. 605-613
Author(s):  
P. S. Conti

Conti: One of the main conclusions of the Wolf-Rayet symposium in Buenos Aires was that Wolf-Rayet stars are evolutionary products of massive objects. Some questions:–Do hot helium-rich stars, that are not Wolf-Rayet stars, exist?–What about the stability of helium rich stars of large mass? We know a helium rich star of ∼40 MO. Has the stability something to do with the wind?–Ring nebulae and bubbles : this seems to be a much more common phenomenon than we thought of some years age.–What is the origin of the subtypes? This is important to find a possible matching of scenarios to subtypes.


1999 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 309-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Fukushima

AbstractBy using the stability condition and general formulas developed by Fukushima (1998 = Paper I) we discovered that, just as in the case of the explicit symmetric multistep methods (Quinlan and Tremaine, 1990), when integrating orbital motions of celestial bodies, the implicit symmetric multistep methods used in the predictor-corrector manner lead to integration errors in position which grow linearly with the integration time if the stepsizes adopted are sufficiently small and if the number of corrections is sufficiently large, say two or three. We confirmed also that the symmetric methods (explicit or implicit) would produce the stepsize-dependent instabilities/resonances, which was discovered by A. Toomre in 1991 and confirmed by G.D. Quinlan for some high order explicit methods. Although the implicit methods require twice or more computational time for the same stepsize than the explicit symmetric ones do, they seem to be preferable since they reduce these undesirable features significantly.


Author(s):  
Godfrey C. Hoskins ◽  
V. Williams ◽  
V. Allison

The method demonstrated is an adaptation of a proven procedure for accurately determining the magnification of light photomicrographs. Because of the stability of modern electrical lenses, the method is shown to be directly applicable for providing precise reproducibility of magnification in various models of electron microscopes.A readily recognizable area of a carbon replica of a crossed-line diffraction grating is used as a standard. The same area of the standard was photographed in Phillips EM 200, Hitachi HU-11B2, and RCA EMU 3F electron microscopes at taps representative of the range of magnification of each. Negatives from one microscope were selected as guides and printed at convenient magnifications; then negatives from each of the other microscopes were projected to register with these prints. By deferring measurement to the print rather than comparing negatives, correspondence of magnification of the specimen in the three microscopes could be brought to within 2%.


Author(s):  
E. R. Kimmel ◽  
H. L. Anthony ◽  
W. Scheithauer

The strengthening effect at high temperature produced by a dispersed oxide phase in a metal matrix is seemingly dependent on at least two major contributors: oxide particle size and spatial distribution, and stability of the worked microstructure. These two are strongly interrelated. The stability of the microstructure is produced by polygonization of the worked structure forming low angle cell boundaries which become anchored by the dispersed oxide particles. The effect of the particles on strength is therefore twofold, in that they stabilize the worked microstructure and also hinder dislocation motion during loading.


Author(s):  
Mihir Parikh

It is well known that the resolution of bio-molecules in a high resolution electron microscope depends not just on the physical resolving power of the instrument, but also on the stability of these molecules under the electron beam. Experimentally, the damage to the bio-molecules is commo ly monitored by the decrease in the intensity of the diffraction pattern, or more quantitatively by the decrease in the peaks of an energy loss spectrum. In the latter case the exposure, EC, to decrease the peak intensity from IO to I’O can be related to the molecular dissociation cross-section, σD, by EC = ℓn(IO /I’O) /ℓD. Qu ntitative data on damage cross-sections are just being reported, However, the microscopist needs to know the explicit dependence of damage on: (1) the molecular properties, (2) the density and characteristics of the molecular film and that of the support film, if any, (3) the temperature of the molecular film and (4) certain characteristics of the electron microscope used


Author(s):  
Robert J. Carroll ◽  
Marvin P. Thompson ◽  
Harold M. Farrell

Milk is an unusually stable colloidal system; the stability of this system is due primarily to the formation of micelles by the major milk proteins, the caseins. Numerous models for the structure of casein micelles have been proposed; these models have been formulated on the basis of in vitro studies. Synthetic casein micelles (i.e., those formed by mixing the purified αsl- and k-caseins with Ca2+ in appropriate ratios) are dissimilar to those from freshly-drawn milks in (i) size distribution, (ii) ratio of Ca/P, and (iii) solvation (g. water/g. protein). Evidently, in vivo organization of the caseins into the micellar form occurs in-a manner which is not identical to the in vitro mode of formation.


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