As part of their early "essentialist" intuitions, young children view intergroup differences as reflecting groups' intrinsic natures. In the present study, we explore the nature and development of "structural" reasoning, or view of intergroup differences as reflecting groups' extrinsic circumstances. We introduced participants (n = 315; ages 5-6, 9-10, and adults) to novel intergroup status disparities that could be attributed to either personal or structural causes.Disparities were verbally framed in either intrinsic, neutral or extrinsic terms. We assessed attributions by asking participants to explain the disparities and to offer interventions for them.We also assessed participants' status-based social preferences. We found that attributions shifted from personal to structural over development. Explanations and interventions for the disparities were correlated and related to the same predictors (framing and age) and outcomes (social preferences), although interventions were consistently more structural than explanations.Implications for essentialism, causal reasoning, and social development are discussed.

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Children often hold "essentialist" intuitions about social categories, viewing them as reflecting people's intrinsic essences or biological natures. This intuition promotes prejudice development (e.g., race-and gender-based prejudices). However, emerging research reveals that essentialism also mitigates prejudice development (e.g., weight-and sexuality-based prejudices). Why do children's essentialist views sometimes promote prejudice, and other times mitigate it? I propose that causal discounting may account for these distinct effects: Essentialism may promote prejudice by leading children to discount structural explanations (i.e., to reason that a group is low-status because of its personal deficiencies rather than its structural disadvantages), but it may mitigate prejudice by leading children to discount agentic explanations (i.e., to reason that a group was "born that way" rather than choosing to be that way). Thus, the consequences of essentialism may reflect both the explanations children endorse as well as those they discount.Cognitive, developmental, and social implications are discussed.

The current study experimentally investigated the impact of causal-explanatory information on weight bias over development. Participants (n = 395, children ages 4-11 years and adults) received either a biological or behavioral explanation for body size, or neither, in three between-subjects conditions. Participants then made preference judgments for characters with smaller versus larger body sizes. Results showed that both behavioral and biological explanations impacted children's preferences. Relative to children's baseline preferences, behavioral explanations enhanced preferences for smaller characters, and biological explanations reduced these preferences-unlike the typical facilitative impact of biological-essentialist explanations on other biases. The explanations did not affect adults' preferences. In contrast to previous findings, we demonstrate that causal knowledge can impact weight bias early in development. Impacts of Causal Explanations on Children's Social Attitudes Children hold rich theories about the causes of social differences that impact their social attitudes. Most prominently, a large literature explores the social consequences of children's "essentialist" intuition that social differences reflect people's internal biology or intrinsic nature (Gelman, 2003 for Keri Carvalho and Rebecca Peretz-Lange shared first authorship.

Adults from Western cultures attribute others' behavior to personal causes more readily than situational causes; however, little research has explored the developmental origins of this attributional bias. Research has shown that children can use both the statistical patterns present in observed behavior, as well as the verbal framing of the behaviors, to infer personal causes.However, research has not explored whether children also use these factors to infer situational causes. The present study examined the impacts of statistical patterns and verbal framing on four-and six-year-old children's (n = 218) attributions to personal and situational causes for behavior, as assessed by their explanations for characters' interactions with toys. In a factorial design the statistical pattern of characters' behaviors suggested either a personal or situational cause (or neither), and the experimenter's verbal framing of the behaviors suggested either a personal or situational cause (or neither). Across age groups, children showed a bias toward providing personal explanations. Both statistical pattern and verbal framing influenced causal attributions, but both impacts were asymmetric such that situational cues increased situational explanations relative to neutral cues, but there was no difference in children's explanations following personal and neutral cues. These results suggest that verbal framing and statistical patterns impact children's developing social causal attributions, specifically with respect to situational causes, and also that a personal attribution bias emerges early in development.