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Cited by 1,247Child and Animal Learning DevelopmentCategorization, perception, and languageScience Education and Pedagogy

The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought

Gelman, Susan A.·2003
DOI 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195154061.001.0001
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Abstract

Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as “dog,” “man,” or “intelligence,” have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. This book argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to 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. This book argues against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious, instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. It also disputes claims that children build up their knowledge of the world based on simple, associative learning strategies, arguing that children's concepts are embedded in rich folk theories. Parents don't explicitly teach children to essentialize; instead, during the preschool years, children spontaneously construct concepts and beliefs that reflect an essentialist bias. The book synthesizes over fifteen years of empirical research on essentialism into a unified framework and explores the broader lessons that the research imparts concerning, among other things, human concepts, children's thinking, and the ways in which language influences thought.

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  • Generics overlook exceptions and variability.

    “They gloss over exceptions and variability.”

    From Generic language in scientific communication (2019) · cites this paper as [22]

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    “given that generics entail the absence of specification and thus are typically shorter than nongeneric claims (22).”

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Authors
Gelman, S. A.
Affiliations
University of Michigan (US)
Corresponding author
Gelman, Susan A.
ORCID
Gelman, Susan A.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
Published
2003-05-08
DOI
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195154061.001.0001
OpenAlex
W4255170620
Cited by
1,247
References
558
Citations by year
2026: 65 · 2025: 86 · 2024: 97 · 2023: 64 · 2022: 60 · 2021: 65 · 2020: 94 · 2019: 68 · 2018: 57 · 2017: 66 · 2016: 50 · 2015: 48 · 2014: 52 · 2013: 44 · 2012: 46
FWCI
34.72
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
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 › Education › Science Education and Pedagogy
Keywords
essentialism, children's conceptions, cognitive biases, folk theories, word learning, category generalization, causal explanation, nature versus nurture, language and thought, preschool children, concept formation

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