Psychological essentialism in children
Abstract
Psychological essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as "lion" or "female", have an underlying reality that cannot be observed directly. Where does this idea come from? This article reviews recent evidence suggesting that psychological essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. These findings argue against the standard view of children as concrete thinkers, instead claiming that children have an early tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features.
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One constituent of folk biology is psychological essentialism, the belief that organisms hold an unobservable, immutable core determining their identity and development and behavior.
“One constituent of 74 this folk biology is psychological essentialism [25] that amounts to the belief that organisms hold 75 an unobservable, immutable core determining their identity and, thus, their development and 76 behavior.”
From Fatal attraction: the intuitive appeal of GMO opposition (2015) · cites this paper as [25]
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Reclaiming Race as a Topic of the U.S. Biology Textbook Curriculum
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- Authors
- GELMAN, S.
- Affiliations
- University of Michigan (US)
- Corresponding author
- GELMAN, S
- ORCID
- GELMAN, S
- Venue
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2004-09
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 404-409
- ISSN
- 1364-6613 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2171259058
- Cited by
- 492
- References
- 65
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 39 · 2023: 33 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 36 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 35 · 2018: 31 · 2017: 27 · 2016: 26 · 2015: 25 · 2014: 37 · 2013: 19 · 2012: 13
- FWCI
- 8.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-36043)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Keywords
- psychological essentialism, children's cognition, category learning, generalization, causal explanation, nature versus nurture, word learning, concrete thinking
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Child, Child Development, Cognition, Female, Humans, Language
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