Contextualizing the development of social essentialism

Priming group identities affects children's resource distribution among groups

The present research investigated the effect of ethnic-national identity on intergroup attitudes among Israeli children. Between 2019 and 2020, 136 Arab Muslim and 136 Jewish 5- and 10-year-olds (boys and girls) participated in one of four ethnic-national identity conditions: ingroup, outgroup, common identity, and control. In each condition, participants were described a city whose residents were defined according to the condition. Then, children were asked to "release" positive and negative animals to an ingroup city, an outgroup city, or a zoo. The results showed that highlighting a common identity improved attitudes across all children, but effect of ingroup and outgroup emphases varied between Jewish and Arab children. These results highlight the different dynamics of social identities among majority and minority children.

The influence of language input on 3-year-olds' learning about novel social categories

There is considerable variability in the social categories that children essentialize and the types of expectations children form about these categories, suggesting children's essentialist beliefs are shaped by environmental input. Prior studies have shown that exposure to generic statements about a social category promotes essentialist beliefs in 4.5- to 8-year-old children. However, by this age children form essentialist beliefs quite robustly, and thus it is unclear whether generic statements impact children's expectations about social categories at younger ages when essentialist beliefs first begin to emerge. Moreover, in prior studies the generic statements were delivered by an experimenter and carefully controlled, and thus it is unclear whether these statements would have the same impact if they occurred in a somewhat less constrained setting, such as parents reading a picture book to their child. The current study addressed these open questions by investigating whether generic statements delivered during a picture-book interaction with their parents influenced 3-year-olds' expectations about members of a novel social category. Our results showed that children who heard generic statements during the picture-book interaction used social-group membership to make inferences about the likely behavior of a novel category member, whereas children who were not exposed to generic statements did not. These findings suggest that as early as 3 years of age, children's expectations about social categories are influenced by generic statements that occur during brief parent-child interactions.

Intuitive biological thinking in Chinese 8th graders

People spontaneously engage in systematic ways of thinking about biology such as human exceptionalism (the tendency of viewing human species as separate from nonhuman species), essentialism (the tendency of assuming category membership as determined by an underlying essence), and teleology (the tendency of seeing purpose as the cause). However, with the majority of past research drawn on Western samples, little is known about whether various types of intuitive biological thinking apply to non-Western contexts. To better understand the nature and cultural prevalence of intuitive biological thinking, we measured essentialist, teleological, and human exceptionalist thinking in a group of Chinese 8th graders. Results demonstrated the presence of all three types of intuitive biological thinking in Chinese middle schoolers, and comparisons with previously published data on U.S. 8th graders showed consistently less human exceptionalism and slightly higher essentialist thinking in China. As such, the current results highlight the prevalence of intuitive biological thinking in an East Asian sample while addressing the potential role of cultural inputs in shaping the way such thinking manifests.

Does It Matter How We Speak About Social Kinds? A Large, Preregistered, Online Experimental Study of How Language Shapes the Development of Essentialist Beliefs

A problematic way to think about social categories is to essentialize them-to treat particular differences between people as marking fundamentally distinct social kinds. From where do these beliefs arise? Language that expresses generic claims about categories elicits some aspects of essentialism, but the scope of these effects remains unclear. This study (N = 204, ages 4.5-8 years, 73% White; recruited predominantly from the United States and the United Kingdom to participate online in 2019) found that generic language increases two critical aspects of essentialist thought: Beliefs that (a) category-related properties arise from intrinsic causal mechanisms and (b) category boundaries are inflexible. These findings have implications for understanding the spread of essentialist beliefs across communities and the development of intergroup behavior.

The development and consequences of moral essentialism

Children report that many natural kinds, social groups, and psychological characteristics arise from an innate, internal "essence" that is rooted in biology and remains stable over time. These perceptions persist into adulthood, albeit often in weakened form. This chapter argues that in addition to the domains previously examined in the essentialism literature, children-and to some extent adults-also view moral characteristics in essentialist terms. This form of essentialism has important social consequences, including in the area of prosocial behavior and in the legal domain. The body of evidence reviewed here suggests that children's and adults' moral judgments depend not just on what people do but also on perceptions of who those people are, i.e., whether they are people of good or bad moral character.

Kindhood and essentialism: Evidence from language

A large body of existing research suggests that people think very differently about categories that are seen as kinds (e.g., women) and categories that are not seen as kinds (e.g., people hanging out in the park right now). Drawing on work in linguistics, we suggest that people represent these two sorts of categories using fundamentally different representational formats. Categories that are not seen as kinds are simply represented as collections of individuals. By contrast, when it comes to kinds, people have two distinct representations: a representation of a collection of individual people and a representation of the kind itself. The distinction between these two representational formats helps to shed light on otherwise puzzling findings about stereotyping and essentialism. Stereotyping appears to involve a representation of a collection of people, while essentialism involves a representation of a kind itself.