Descriptive-to-prescriptive (D2P) reasoning: An early emerging bias to maintain the status quo

Group norms are necessary for navigating the social world, but they also constrain how we think about individuals. This manuscript progresses in three parts, along the way integrating research from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, as well as the broader social sciences, to present a theoretical perspective on how the tendency to interpret descriptive norms (i.e., what is) as prescriptive (i.e., what should be) is an early...