The Blood of Others: Breeding Plants, Animals, and White People in the Spanish Atlantic

How origin stories shape children’s social reasoning

“…This belief in the immutability of kinds-that different kinds of things are what they are because it is the will of a powerful creator-is fundamentally essentialist in nature, depicting categories as stable, homogenous, and objectively true (Diesendruck & Gelman, 1999;Gelman, 2003;Emmons & Kelemen, 2015;Medin & Ortony, 1989;Shtulman & Schulz, 2008). Indeed, adults who endorse creationist explanations about the origins of the natural world hold more essentialist beliefs about animal kinds than those who do not (Clément, 2015;Hill, 2014;Miller, Scott, & Okamoto, 2006). More religious adults also report higher levels of gender essentialism, and they endorse stricter normative beliefs about what members of gender categories are supposed to do and be like (Robinson & Smetana, 2019).…”