The Development of Social Essentialism

Expecting a gentle baby tiger to inevitably grow up to be ferocious, a young girl growing up in a household of boys to prefer princesses to toy trucks, or that liberals and conservatives are fundamentally different kinds of people, all reflect a conceptual commitment to psychological essentialism. Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to think that some everyday categories reflect the real, underlying, natural structure of the world. Whereas essentialist thought can sometimes be useful, it is often problematic, particularly when people rely on essentialist thinking to understand groups of people, including those based on gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. This Volume will bring together diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives on how essentialist thinking about the social world develops in childhood and on the implications of these beliefs for children’s social behavior and intergroup relations more generally.

This volume draws on diverse theoretical perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, and empirical work from experiments with children and cross-cultural studies to provide a comprehensive view of how social essentialism develops.This volume addresses the link between cognition (essentialist beliefs) and social behavior, with implications for prejudice, morality, the justice system, and inter-group relations.By drawing on a diverse evidence base, this volume addresses how beliefs emerge from the interplay among children’s conceptual biases and their social experiences.

1. What is social essentialism and how does it develop? Marjorie Rhodes and Kelsey Moty 2. Why do children essentialize social groups? Gil Diesendruck 3. Contextualizing the development of social essentialism Kristin Pauker, Christine Tai and Shahana Ansari 4. The development of essentialist, ethnic, and civic intuitions about national categories Aidan Feeney, Jocelyn Dautel, Kieran Phillips, Jessica Leffers and John D. Coley 5. Kindhood and essentialism: Evidence from language Katherine Ritchie and Joshua Knobe 6. The development and consequences of moral essentialism  Larisa Heiphetz 7. Does essentialism lead to racial prejudice?: It’s not so black and white Tara M. Mandalaywala