• DOI:10.1037/a0030399
Corpus ID: 4810044

Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default.

@article{Kelemen2013ProfessionalPS,
  title={Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default.},
  author={D. Kelemen and Joshua Rottman and Rebecca Seston},
  journal={Journal of experimental psychology. General},
  year={2013},
  volume={142 4},
  pages={
          1074-83
        }
}

• D. Kelemen, Joshua Rottman, Rebecca Seston
• Published 2013
• Psychology, Medicine
• Journal of experimental psychology. General

Teleological explanations account for objects and events by reference to a functional consequence or purpose. Although they are popular in religion, they are unpopular in science: Physical scientists in particular explicitly reject them when explaining natural phenomena. However, prior research provides reasons to suspect that this explanatory form may represent a default explanatory preference. As a strong test of this hypothesis, we explored whether physical scientists endorse teleological… Expand

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