Do formal explanations promote essentialist reasoning in children?

• In Event: 3-027 - The socialization of prejudice: New insights from international samples

Integrative Statement

How do children form essentialist beliefs? One mechanism is through language. For example, generic statements (e.g., Gelman et al., 2010; Rhodes et al., 2012) and count-noun labels (e.g., Gelman & Heyman, 1999) have been shown to promote essentialist reasoning in children. In the present research, we examined another form of linguistic input— formal explanations—and how they may contribute to essentialism. Formal explanations explain why an object or person has a particular property (e.g., “She sews”) by citing membership in a category (e.g., “because she’s a girl”; Prasada & Dillingham, 2006, 2009). These explanations could promote essentialist beliefs because they may signal that there’s something about, say, being a girl that’s causally responsible for her sewing. That is, formal explanations may indirectly suggest the presence of an unknown or unstated causal essence. We hypothesized that hearing formal explanations would license essentialist beliefs.
For a broad test of this hypothesis, we investigated formal explanations in two domains: animal kinds (Study 1) and social categories (Study 2). In Study 1, we taught 5- to 6-year-olds (n = 104) (61 girls; Mage = 5.90) novel behavioral features of animal kinds using either a formal explanation (e.g., “It likes to sleep standing up because it’s a giraffe.”) or closely matched wording (e.g., “It’s a giraffe. It likes to sleep standing up.”) We administered measures of essentialism that assessed beliefs about stability over time, innateness, and inductive potential. In this and the subsequent study, responses were scored from 0-1, with higher scores representing stronger essentialism. We submitted children’s responses to a multilevel linear model with condition, child’s age (continuous), and their interaction as predictors. As predicted, children who heard formal explanations gave more essentialist responses (M = .72) than children who did not (M = .65), p = .039. There was a tendency for children to give more essentialist responses with age, p = .050. The condition by age interaction, however, was not significant, p = .60 (see Figure 1).
In Study 2, we taught 5- to 6-year-olds (n = 93) (50 girls; Mage = 5.95) novel behavioral features of boys and girls using the same manipulation from Study 1 (e.g., “She likes to eat gooseberries because she’s a girl.” vs. “She’s a girl. She likes to eat gooseberries.”). We administered measures of essentialism that assessed beliefs about stability over time, stability across contexts, and inductive potential. Although the main effect of condition was not significant, p = .11, the condition by age interaction was, p = .044. Six-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds, showed higher essentialism for properties introduced via formal explanations (ps = .011 and .999, respectively; see Figure 2). Children also gave more essentialist responses with age, p = .003.
Together, results from these studies highlight a potential mechanism by which children acquire essentialist beliefs. In the social domain, children as young as 6-years-old were sensitive to the subtle message conveyed by formal explanations. Thus, this form of input may play a role in the development of stereotyping and prejudice.

Authors

• Melis Muradoglu, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Kristan Marchak, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrei Cimpian, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Gelman, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author