Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter-group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beliefs. Three studies (N = 127, ages 4.5-6) found that experimentally inducing essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led children to share fewer resources with category members, but did not lead to the out-group dislike that defines social prejudice. These findings indicate that essentialism negatively influences some key components of inter-group relations, but does not lead directly to the development of prejudice. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS• Essentialism has been proposed to have negative social ramifications.• Three studies experimentally tested this proposal among young children.• Essentialism led children to withhold resources from out-group members.• Essentialism did not lead to out-group dislike. | INTRODUCTIONExpecting a gentle baby tiger to inevitably grow up to be ferocious, an apple seed to develop into an apple tree even if planted in an olive grove, or a young girl growing up in a household of boys to prefer princesses to trucks, all reflect a conceptual commitment to psychological essentialism (Medin & Ortony, 1989). Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories (e.g., tigers, apple trees, girls) as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members, as highly predictive of individual development regardless of other influences, and as marking fundamental similarities among members and differences between kinds (Gelman, 2004). Essentialist beliefs shape how people represent and reason about many types of categories from at least the early preschool years onward (Gelman, 2003).Essentialism has most often been studied in the case of biological categories, such as animal species. For example, essentialist beliefs about tigers entail thinking that whether an animal is a tiger is stable and determined by birth, that tigers are fundamentally similar to each other and different from non-tigers, and that an animal -once born to tiger parents -will inevitably grow up to be ferocious, even if it looks different from other tigers (e.g., is white instead of orange) or is raised in an unusual environment (e.g., in a zoo, where it has few opportunities to learn or practice ferocious behaviors; Gelman, 2004;Medin & Ortony, 1989;Prentice & Miller, 2007). By at least age 4, children make inferences in line with each of these beliefs (Gelman & Markman, 1986, 1987Gelman & Wellman, 1991;Waxman, Medin, & Ross, 2007; for review see Gelman, 2003).In the case of animal categories, psychological essentialism may help get conceptual development off the ground and facilitate knowledge acquisition by allowing children to overlook superficial differences (e.g., between orange ...

The persistent underrepresentation of women in science limits women's intellectual and economic opportunities and impedes scientific progress by constraining the available talent pool (Beede et al., 2011). The roots of this disparity take hold in early childhood (Bian, Leslie, & Cimpian, 2017; Chapin, 2006; Weinburgh, 1995): Gender stereotypes about who can or should do science, and gendered patterns of interest in science, emerge by the time children begin formal schooling and widen across development (Newton & Newton, 1992; Nosek et al., 2009; Zhai, Jocz, & Tan, 2014). The present studies tested whether subtle linguistic cuesdescribing science as an action (e.g., asking children to "do science") instead of an identity (e.g., encouraging children to "be scientists")-increase girls' persistence in new science activities. Our aim was to identify modifiable elements of young children's environments that could help to bolster early science engagement. In early childhood, children begin to develop beliefs that some variations in human behavior mark fundamentally distinct kinds of people whereas other variation is more temporary and incidental (Gelman, 2003; Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017). Thus, when it comes to science, children may view variations in interest, knowledge, or abilities as indications that some people are fundamentally "science people" or "true scientists deep down" and some people are not (Knobe, Prasada, & Newman, 2013; Rattan, Good, & Dweck, 2012); alternatively, they may perceive such variations as reflecting flexible differences in mood or previous experiences. During the preschool years, when children are just beginning to develop beliefs about their own capacities for academic success (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), subtle linguistic cues can powerfully shape whether children view variations as marking fundamentally distinct kinds of people. Specifically, category labels and generic claims lead children to view particular features as marking fundamentally distinct kinds of people when they would not otherwise do so (Baron,