Abstract
According to the dominant view of category representation, people preferentially infer that kinds (richly structured categories) reflect essences. Generic language (“Boys like blue”) often occupies the central role in accounts of the formation of essentialist interpretations—especially in the context of social categories. In a preregistered study (n = 240 American children, ages 4 to 9 y), we tested whether children assume essences in the presence of generic language or whether they flexibly assume diverse causal structures. Children learned about a novel social category described with generic statements containing either biological properties or cultural properties. Although generic language always led children to believe that properties were nonaccidental, young children (4 or 5 y) in this sample inferred the nonaccidental structure was socialization. Older children (6 to 9 y) flexibly interpreted the category as essential or socialized depending on the type of properties that generalized. We uncovered early-emerging flexibility and no privileged link between kinds and essences.
Highlights
Supporting a link between kind representations and essentialism, several studies found that generic statements increased essentialist reasoning in children and adults [9,10,11]
The primary advance over previous developmental studies is that we systematically varied property content, and we measured kindhood separately from essentialism. These advances allowed us to test whether generic language induced kind representations and whether children were biased to assume that kinds reflect essences
General Discussion Results indicate no privileged link between kinds and essences in childhood
Summary
Children may fail to distinguish between biological and cultural generics and default to essentialism If true, this default would indicate a special connection between kinds and essences, such that adults overcome an early-emerging essentialist bias. 11) is that we systematically varied property content (instead of presenting both properties in a single condition), and we measured kindhood separately from essentialism (instead of including measures of kindhood within a single “essentialism” composite measure) Together, these advances allowed us to test whether generic language induced kind representations and whether children were biased to assume that kinds reflect essences (i.e., to assume kinds are naturally determined rather than socially constructed). We predicted that generic language would increase kindhood and that 1) if children initially do not distinguish between biological and cultural generics they should reveal no bias to infer kinds as reflecting essences and that 2) once children notice the contrast they should have flexible representations of kinds
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