Preschool Ontology: The Role of Beliefs About Category Boundaries in Early Categorization

Abstract

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N= 48, ages 3–4) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete and strict, but the boundaries of other categories (artifact categories, human race) as more flexible. Study 2 demonstrated that these domain-specific ontological intuitions guide children’s learning of new categories; children (N = 28, 3-year-olds) assumed that the boundaries of novel animal categories would be narrower and more strictly defined than novel artifact categories. These data demonstrate that abstract beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries shape early conceptual development.

“American = English Speaker” Before “American = White”: The Development of Children's Reasoning About Nationality

“…To test whether children systematically categorized speakers of particular languages or members of particular racial groups as either “American” or “Korean,” binomial tests were performed for each trial type to assess whether children were more likely to categorize targets as “American” or “Korean” than would be expected by chance (for additional studies that employ binomial tests, see Corriveau, Kinzler, & Harris, ; Rhodes, Gelman, & Karuza, ; VanderBorght & Jaswal, ). For ease of comparison, all means are presented as the proportion of trials in which children judged targets as “American.” Proportions closer to 1 indicate that children categorized targets as “American,” whereas proportions closer to 0 indicate that children categorized targets as “Korean.”…”

The Origins of Social Categorization

“…For example, children expect members of a social group to share deep properties, including preferences, traits, and norms [33–37], and they expect characteristics that mark social category membership to endure over time [38–39]. Indeed, preschoolers expect group members to follow social conventions [40], and negatively evaluate people who do not follow their social group’s conventions and norms [41–42], suggesting they view conforming to the group as a fundamentally important feature of group membership.…”

Multiracial Children’s and Adults’ Categorizations of Multiracial Individuals

“…We included these age groupings because they were the focus of prior research with monoracial participants (Authors, in press), and because race-based concepts develop across these years (Quintana, 1998; Rhodes, Gelman, & Karuza, 2014). For theoretical purposes mentioned above, we focused on a multiracial sample of individuals who were of both white and racial-minority descent (or who were explicitly labeled as multiracial, biracial, or mixed), whose categorization biases could thus stem from either pro-white biases or experiences with being categorized by others and identifying as racial minority.…”

“…Thus, this method avoids gender-of-target effects and provides a conservative test of categorization biases. The curtain method was used because it (a) assessed participants' beliefs about race-based category boundaries, (b) prevented participants from using a perceptual matching strategy (see Rhodes et al, 2014), and (c) allowed participants to indicate that the individual was not necessarily black or white.…”