Do children have a theory of race?

Abstract

In recent years a number of studies have detailed young children's enriched, domain-specific, and theory-like understanding in several cognitive domains, including naive biology, naive psychology, and reasoning about physical objects. With few exceptions, students of cognition have not considered the possibility that the acquisition and representation of social categories may also be governed by a specialized faculty for understanding. Rather, most accounts of children's social categorization assume that the classification of the human realm is derived from observations of superficial differences in appearance and does not include expectations of deeper commonalities among category members. Five experiments are reported that challenge this view. The results indicate that young children's inferences about human racial variation involve domain-specific reasoning that parallels but is distinct from common sense understanding of naive biology. These findings have implications for our understanding of the transfer of knowledge across domains and for determining the appropriate level of description of domain-specific devices.