Causal beliefs about why features are frequent underlie is-ought reasoning.

Participants assumed that frequent features of novel animals were functional.

Participants also thought functional features were more typical.

Functional explanations licensed normative judgments about how animals ought to be.

Beliefs in causal processes (e.g., evolution) moderated functional explanations.

Knowing which features are frequent among a biological kind (e.g., that most zebras have stripes) shapes people’s representations of what category members are like (e.g., that typical zebras have stripes) and normative judgments about what they ought to be like (e.g., that zebras should have stripes). In the current work, we ask if people’s inclination to explain why features are frequent is a key mechanism through which what “is” shapes beliefs about what “ought” to be. Across four studies (N = 591), we find that frequent features are often explained by appeal to feature function (e.g., that stripes are for camouflage), that functional explanations in turn shape judgments of typicality, and that functional explanations and typicality both predict normative judgments that category members ought to have functional features. We also identify the causal assumptions that license inferences from feature frequency and function, as well as the nature of the normative inferences that are drawn: by specifying an instrumental goal (e.g., camouflage), functional explanations establish a basis for normative evaluation. These findings shed light on how and why our representations of how the natural world is shape our judgments of how it ought to be.

Concepts

Folk biology

Normativity

Causal reasoning

Functional explanation

Teleology

All data and analysis code are available on OSF and linked in the ms. (https://osf.io/863rc/)

© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.