Research has found that children possess a broad bias in favor of teleological--or purpose-based--explanations of natural phenomena. The current two experiments explored whether adults implicitly possess a similar bias. In Study 1, undergraduates judged a series of statements as "good" (i.e., correct) or "bad" (i.e., incorrect) explanations for…

We present three experiments in which subjects were asked to make speeded sex judgements (Experiment 1) or semantic judgements (Sections 3 and 4) to face targets and nonface items, while ignoring a solitary flanking distractor face or a nonface stimulus. Distractors could be either congruent (same response category) or incongruent (different…