Labels are one source of our judgments. By assigning labels to objects, we not
only create references but we also group prior and current experiences together. The goal
of this research is to investigate how labels influence our judgments. Previous research
on inductive generalization shows that labels can be more important than physical
characteristics (the labeling effect), but the mechanism for this effect remains unclear.
There are two differing views regarding the role of labels. One view proposes that labels
are not essentially different from physical features: shared labels increase overall
similarity between two items in the same way as shared physical features. The other
view suggests that people have a naïve theory that shared labels are more special than
shared physical features. The goal of this dissertation is to provide evidence that
complements these conflicting views. I suggest that the role of labels varies depending
on the background knowledge: types of categories (living things vs. man-made objects),
amount of knowledge (number of exemplars people could list for the category), and
types of labels (categorical vs. indexical). The results from four experiments showed
that, for living things, the labeling effect is strong and depends less on the amount of knowledge; for man-made objects, the labeling effect is weak and depends on the
amount of knowledge.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-08-8386 |
| Date | 2010 August 1900 |
| Creators | Yu, Na-Yung |
| Contributors | Yamauchi, Takashi |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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