Social essentialism entails the belief that certain social categories (e.g., gender, race) mark fundamentally distinct kinds of people. Essentialist beliefs have pernicious consequences, supporting social stereotyping and contributing to prejudice. How does social essentialism develop? In the studies reported here, we tested the hypothesis that generic language facilitates the cultural transmission of social essentialism. Two studies found that hearing generic language about a novel social category diverse for race, ethnicity, age, and sex led 4-y-olds and adults to develop essentialist beliefs about that social category. A third study documented that experimentally inducing parents to hold essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led them to produce more generic language when discussing the category with their children. Thus, generic language facilitates the transmission of essentialist beliefs about social categories from parents to children.

Previous research indicates that the ontological status that adults attribute to categories varies systematically by domain. For example, adults view distinctions between different animal species as natural and objective, but view distinctions between different kinds of furniture as more conventionalized and subjective. The present work (N = 435; ages 5-18) examined the effects of domain, age, and cultural context on beliefs about the naturalness vs. conventionality of categories. Results demonstrate that young children, like adults, view animal categories as natural kinds, but artifact categories as more conventionalized. For human social categories (gender and race), beliefs about naturalness and conventionality were predicted by interactions between cultural context and age. Implications for the origins of social categories and theories of conceptual development will be discussed.Keywords cognitive development; natural kinds; social categories; concepts; categorization; culture; gender; race; naïve biology; artifacts An important developmental achievement is that of organizing experience into categories (e.g., tigers, chairs, girls). Categories enable us to store information efficiently and to generalize and extend knowledge in new ways. To develop functional adult-like concepts, children must learn not only how objects are commonly classified, but also what kind of meaning to attribute to categories. The goal of the present set of studies was to examine the fundamental meaning that individuals affix to categories in various domains across development. Specifically, we examine developmental and cultural influences on whether particular categories are understood as reflecting the objective, natural structure of the world (i.e., as natural kinds) or as subjective groupings that are dependent on convention (i.e., as conventionalized categories).The question of whether categories reflect objectively-determined, natural structure or subjective, flexible conventions has been the subject of rich philosophical discussion about the relations among representation, language, and nature (Putnam, 1975; Quine, 1969;Schwartz, 1979;Wilson, 1999). With regard to cognitive psychology, this distinction provides an Address for correspondence: Marjorie Rhodes, 2422 East Hall, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. rhodesma@umich.edu. Phone: 734-646-2360. Fax: 734 764 3520. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCogn Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 November 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Auth...

Two studies (N = 456) compared the development of concepts of animal species and human gender, using a switched-at-birth reasoning task. Younger children (5-and 6-year-olds) treated animal species and human gender as equivalent; they made similar levels of category-based inferences and endorsed similar explanations for development in these two domains. In contrast, 10-year-olds and adults treated gender and species concepts as distinct from one another. They viewed gender-linked behavioral properties as open to environmental influence, and endorsed environment-based mechanisms to explain gender development. At all ages, children demonstrated differentiated reasoning about physical and behavioral properties, although this differentiation became more stable with age. The role of psychological essentialism in guiding conceptual development is discussed.A number of theorists have compared children's and adults' reasoning about gender and other human social categories to their reasoning about animal species, proposing that people appeal to a notion of a category "essence" in their reasoning about both kinds of categories (Allport, 1954;Atran, 1990;Atran et al., 2001;Gil-White, 2001; Haslam, Rothschild, Ernst, 2000;Hirschfeld, 1996; Rothbart & Taylor, 1992;Taylor, 1996). Psychological essentialism indicates that people treat certain categories as having an underlying reality or true nature that gives category members their identity and observable properties (Medin & Ortony, 1989). Evidence that young children, like adults, reason about categories as if they are determined by underlying essences has led to the proposal that psychological essentialism results from early emerging cognitive biases that guide conceptual development (Gelman, 2003).The proposal that children apply the same explanatory framework to understand both animal species and human social categories has fostered rich theoretical questioning and debate regarding the onset of psychological essentialism in children's biological and social reasoning. For example, do children transfer essentialist reasoning from their concepts of animal species to understand the social world (Atran, 1990;Gil-White, 2001), or is psychological essentialism instantiated separately in the biological and social domains (Hirschfeld, 1996)? How similar is children's reasoning about animal and human social categories with respect to their ideas about what might constitute a category essence and how an essence is obtained (Kanovsky, 2007)? Yet, despite the richness of these theoretical questions, little empirical work has directly compared children's reasoning about human social categories and animal species (for exceptions see Astuti, Solomon, & Carey, 2004; Rhodes & Gelman, in press). The goal of the present set of studies was to compare children's reasoning about animal and gender development regarding several aspects of psychological essentialism: the immutability of Address for correspondence: Marianne Taylor, Department of Psychology, Pacific Lutheran University, Taco...

Social categorization is an early-developing feature of human social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of and predictions about human behavior has been unclear. In the studies reported here, we tested whether a foundational functional role of social categories is to mark people as intrinsically obligated to one another (e.g., obligated to protect rather than harm). In three studies, children (aged 3-9, N = 124) viewed only within-category harm as violating intrinsic obligations; in contrast, they viewed between-category harm as violating extrinsic obligations defined by explicit rules. These data indicate that children view social categories as marking patterns of intrinsic interpersonal obligations, suggesting that a key function of social categories is to support inferences about how people will relate to members of their own and other groups.

People often view certain ways of classifying people (e.g., by gender, race, or ethnicity) as reflecting real distinctions found in nature. Such categories are viewed as marking meaningful, fundamental, and informative differences between distinct kinds of people. The present paper examines the development of these essentialist intuitive theories of how the social world is structured, along with the developmental consequences of these beliefs. We first examine the processes that give rise to social essentialism, arguing that essentialism emerges as children actively attempt to make sense of their environment by relying on several basic representational and explanatory biases. These developmental processes give rise to the widespread emergence of social essentialist views in early childhood, but allow for vast variability across development and cultural contexts in the precise nature of these beliefs. We then examine what is known and still to be discovered about the implications of essentialism for stereotyping, inter-group interaction, and the development of social prejudice. We conclude with directions for future research, particularly on the theoretical payoff that could be gained by including more diverse samples of children in future developmental investigations.

Four studies examined children's (ages 3-10, Total N=235) naïve theories of social groups, in particular, their expectations about how group memberships constrain social interactions. After introduction to novel groups of people, preschoolers (ages 3-5) reliably expected agents from one group to harm members of the other group (rather than members of their own) but expected agents to help members of both groups equally often. Preschoolers expected between-group harm across multiple ways of defining social groups. Older children (ages 6-10) reliably expected agents to harm members of the other group and to help members of their own. Implications for the development of social cognition are discussed.

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 ...

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science-research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and independently, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and we describe the resources we have made available on a new website (discoveriesonline.org) to help researchers get started with implementing this approach. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field. The field of cognitive development was founded upon remarkable insights gleaned from everyday interactions with children. Piaget's theory of cognitive development (1954) began with his observations of his own children playing on their mats, dropping things from their highchairs, and playing with marbles. Carey (1985) revolutionized our understanding of how concepts originate and change by analyzing conversations with her own child about birth, the nature of life, and death. The field is full of stories of great theoretical insights made by researchers closely watching children as they crawl around near the sides of high beds (Adolph, Kretch, & LoBue, 2014), negotiate the rules of games among themselves on a playground (Borman, 1981), and try to sit down on way-too-tiny toy tractors (DeLoache, 1987). Of course, the field has never relied on the observations of individual researchers alone. We use these observations to design experiments that recreate the situations in which the behaviors were first observed, which can then be replicated by labs around the world. But still, individual interactions between researchers and their participants have always been central to the field of cognitive development. The notion that we can learn from watching and interacting with children, along with the intriguing challenges of thinking about how to recreate the conditions of everyday life in CONTACT Marjorie Rhodes