Although the inherence heuristic is a versatile cognitive process that addresses a wide range of psychological phenomena, we propose that ownership information represents an important test case for evaluating both the boundaries of Cimpian & Salomon's (C&S's) model (e.g., is the inherence heuristic meaningfully limited to only inherent factors?) and its effectiveness as a mechanism for explaining psychological essentialism.

This commentary highlights the importance of attending to the sociocultural contexts that foster essentialist ideas. It contends that Cimpian & Salomon's (C&S's) model undervalues the extent to which the development of essentialist beliefs is contingent on social experience. The result is a restriction of the model's applicability to real-world instances of essentialism-fuelled prejudice and discrimination.

Recent evidence shows that psychological essentialism is neither a universal nor stable feature of human cognition. The extent to which people report essentialist intuitions varies enormously across cultures and education levels, and is also influenced by subtle, normatively irrelevant contextual manipulations. These results challenge the notion that the human mind is “fitted” with a built-in inherence heuristic that produces essentialist intuitions.

Research on the representation of generic knowledge suggests that inherent properties can have either a principled or a causal connection to a kind. The type of connection determines whether the outcome of the storytelling process will include intuitions of inevitability and a normative dimension and whether it will ground causal explanations.

Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) present promising steps towards understanding the cognitive underpinnings of adult essentialism. However, their approach is less convincing regarding ontogenetic and evolutionary aspects. In contrast to C&S's claim, the so-called inherence heuristic, though perhaps vital in adult reasoning, seems an implausible candidate for the developmental and evolutionary foundations of psychological essentialism. A more plausible candidate is kind-based object individuation that already embodies essentialist modes of thinking and that is present in infants and nonhuman primates.

Children adopt an inherence-based view of some social categories, viewing certain social categories as reflecting the inherent features of their members. Thinking of social categories in these terms contributes to prejudice and intergroup conflict. Thus, understanding what leads children to apply inherence-based views to particular categories could provide new direction for efforts to reduce these negative social phenomena.

Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) propose that the inherence heuristic, a tendency to explain the behavior and other properties of things in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, precedes and explains “essentialist thinking” about natural kinds. This commentary reviews evidence that it is rather essentialism (or something like it) that precedes the assumption of inherence, and suggests that essentialism can do without the inherence heuristic altogether.

Recent experimental evidence indicates that intuitions about inherence and system justification are distinct psychological processes, and that the inherence heuristic supplies important explanatory frameworks that are accepted or rejected based on their consistency with one's motivation to justify the system.

The inherence heuristic is characterized as part of an instantiation of a more general model that describes the interaction between undeveloped intuitions, produced by System 1 heuristics, and developed beliefs, constructed by System 2 reasoning. The general model is described and illustrated by examining another instantiation of the process that constructs belief in objective moral value.

We argue (1) that the empirical evidence offered by the authors is insufficient to sustain their claim; (2) that, beyond methodological problems, the proposed underlying cognitive mechanism is largely speculative and that a reverse, more motivational, path is equally plausible; and (3) that the distinction and antecedence of inherence intuitions with respect to essentialist beliefs remain to be demonstrated.

The inherence heuristic is a cognitive process that supplies quick and effortless explanations for a wide variety of observations. Due in part to biases in memory retrieval, this heuristic tends to overproduce explanations that appeal to the inherent features of the entities in the observations being explained (hence the heuristic's name). In this response, we use the commentators' input to clarify, refine, and expand the inherence heuristic model. The end result is a piece that complements the target article, amplifying its theoretical contribution.