The influence of linguistic form and causal explanations on the development of social essentialism

Speaking of Kinds: How Correcting Generic Statements can Shape Children's Concepts

“…For example, participants were asked, “Why is this Zarpie sleeping in a tall tree?” and selected one of two possible explanations for the property: a transient, extrinsic cause (e.g., “He couldn't find a bed”; scored as 0), or an inherent, category‐general cause (e.g., “A lot of Zarpies like to sleep up high”; scored as 1). The questions were similar to those used in previous work (Gelman et al., 2010; Rhodes et al., 2012; see also Benitez et al., 2022; Leshin et al., 2021), and the answer choices offered to children were based on common explanations generated by children in our preliminary studies. The order of the explanation choices was counterbalanced between participants.…”

“…Generic language robustly relates to essentialist beliefs about categories. In experimental contexts, when children are introduced to new categories via a series of generic (e.g., “Zarpies have striped hair”) rather than specific (e.g., “This Zarpie has striped hair”) descriptions, they develop stronger beliefs that category features are broadly shared across members (e.g., that Zarpies have other things in common, beyond striped hair; Benitez et al, 2022; Gelman et al., 2010; Leshin et al., 2021; Rhodes et al., 2012), that category features are inflexible (e.g., a Zarpie cannot have nonstriped hair; Benitez et al., 2022; Leshin et al., 2021; Roberts et al, 2017), and that category features are intrinsic and innate (e.g., inherited from Zarpie parents rather than caused by social mechanisms; Gelman et al., 2010; Leshin et al., 2021; Rhodes et al., 2012). In naturalistic settings, adults produce more generics to describe categories for which they themselves hold essentialist beliefs (e.g., for animal species and some social categories vs. for artifact categories or ad hoc groupings), and children correspondingly develop more essentialist beliefs about the categories and domains that they frequently hear described with generics (Brandone & Gelman, 2009; Gelman et al, 2008; Goldin‐Meadow et al., 2005; Pappas & Gelman, 1998; Segall et al, 2015).…”

Tell me your (cognitive) budget, and I’ll tell you what you value

“…The role of causal generics in essentialism (Gelman, 2003;Haslam et al, 2000;Rhodes et al, 2012) and the "inherence heuristic" (Bigler and Clark, 2014;Cimpian, 2015;Cimpian andSalomon, 2014a, 2014b;Gelman and Roberts, 2017;Hussak and Cimpian, 2018;Salomon and Cimpian, 2014). According to this literature, the use of generics, including causal generics, may communicate that the group is a natural kind, such that individuals are members of the group in virtue of their possessing inherent, essential properties that are stable across time and space (Benitez et al, 2022;Cimpian and Markman, 2011;Foster-Hanson et al, 2022;Gelman, 2013;Leslie, 2014;Ritchie, 2021;Wodak et al, 2015). The current paper contributes to this discussion by identifying a further communicative role for causal generics involving social categories: a role in conveying the speaker's values, by which we mean not just their moral values, but the values that more broadly govern their decisions.…”

When do generics lead to social essentialism: developmental evidence from Iran

“…On this account, the pathway from generics to social essentialism is independent of the content of the generic statements and the consequent inherent explanations. According to this account, children learn to essentialize categories very early on and generic language signals to them which social categories are salient in their communities and prime "candidates" for essential reasoning (Benitez et al, 2022, Foster-Hanson et al, 2022. Consequently, regardless of the explicit information communicated in a generic sentence, using generic terms (e.g., "Turks") signals to children that these categories are culturally relevant and appropriate targets for essentialization.…”