Do We Appeal to the Knowledge of Our Political Rivals?

Categorical explanations involve the use of labels to account for various properties of the explanandum. Prior research shows that the degree to which a label is perceived to be entrenched in society impacts the judged quality of the categorical explanation that invokes it regardless of how informative the explanation actually is. The aim of the present paper is to investigate whether the label entrenchment effect persists even when the label is said to be entrenched only in a particular community (rather than in society at large) and whether one's relationship to the entrenching community mediates the effect. Across five online behavioral experiments, we show that US partisans (Democrats and Republicans) rated the informativeness of a circular categorical explanation as higher when the label it invokes is entrenched in their own political community than when it is entrenched in the rival political community. However, being entrenched in the rival political community led to higher informativeness judgments than not being entrenched at all. Finally, we show that the effect does not occur when the label is entrenched in an epistemically suspect community, the Flat Earth Society.