3-141 - New Perspectives on the Development of Essentialist Thought

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Questions of identity—what makes someone who they are—have occupied humanists and social scientists for centuries. Recently, developmentalists have used essentialism—the notion that some internal features are informative, genetic, and central to identity—to investigate this topic. Uniting work from developmental psychology, social psychology, and philosophy, this symposium examines how essentialism emerges.

Paper 1 shows that infants’ judgments about animate beings depend on knowledge of internal causal mechanisms, suggesting that essentialism’s origins lie in infancy. Paper 2 proposes that essentialism develops from a tendency to explain via inherent features, which describe how an object is constituted—a tendency that emerges before many components of essentialism. Paper 3 shows that some forms of essentialism emerge earlier than others. For example, adults—but not children—prefer genetic over environmental explanations for traits such as intelligence. While Paper 1 demonstrates that some aspects of essentialism emerge during infancy, Papers 2-3 highlight later-emerging elements. Paper 4 finds that adults, but not children, view others’ moral beliefs in more essentialist terms than their own. Furthermore, whereas philosophers have argued that memory is central to identity, Paper 4 shows that children and adults judge morality to be central.

These papers clarify the development of essentialism by showing that this form of reasoning emerges earlier than previously thought and that children reason differently about different components of essentialism. In addition to contributing to literatures on essentialism and social cognitive development, findings also speak to debates concerning nativism and the role of experimental evidence in philosophy.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Larisa Heiphetz, Boston College

Individual Presentations

• The Ins(ides) and Outs(ides) of Infants’ Representations of Agents - Presenting Author: Erik Wayne Cheries, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Three-Year-Olds Explain via Inherent Features, not Essences: Evidence that Essentialism Develops out of an Explanatory Heuristic - Presenting Author: Andrei Cimpian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Christina Marie Tworek, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Genes, Environment, or Choice? Children's and Adults' Causal Attributions for Personal Characteristics - Presenting Author: Meredith Meyer, Otterbein University; Steven Othello Roberts, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Toby E. Jayaratne, The University of Michigan; Susan A Gelman, Univ of Michigan

• Children’s and Adults’ Reasoning about Identity: Perspectives from Psychology and Philosophy - Presenting Author: Larisa Heiphetz, Boston College; Nina Strohminger, Duke University; Liane L. Young, Boston College