Do children have a theory of race?

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(95)91425-R

Cognition

Volume 54, Issue 2, February 1995, Pages 209-252

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(95)91425-R Get rights and content

Abstract

In recent years a number of studies have detailed young children's enriched, domain-specific, and theory-like understanding in several cognitive domains, including naive biology, naive psychology, and reasoning about physical objects. With few exceptions, students of cognition have not considered the possibility that the acquisition and representation of social categories may also be governed by a specialized faculty for understanding. Rather, most accounts of children's social categorization assume that the classification of the human realm is derived from observations of superficial differences in appearance and does not include expectations of deeper commonalities among category members. Five experiments are reported that challenge this view. The results indicate that young children's inferences about human racial variation involve domain-specific reasoning that parallels but is distinct from common sense understanding of naive biology. These findings have implications for our understanding of the transfer of knowledge across domains and for determining the appropriate level of description of domain-specific devices.

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There is considerable variability in the social categories that children essentialize and the types of expectations children form about these categories, suggesting children's essentialist beliefs are shaped by environmental input. Prior studies have shown that exposure to generic statements about a social category promotes essentialist beliefs in 4.5- to 8-year-old children. However, by this age children form essentialist beliefs quite robustly, and thus it is unclear whether generic statements impact children's expectations about social categories at younger ages when essentialist beliefs first begin to emerge. Moreover, in prior studies the generic statements were delivered by an experimenter and carefully controlled, and thus it is unclear whether these statements would have the same impact if they occurred in a somewhat less constrained setting, such as parents reading a picture book to their child. The current study addressed these open questions by investigating whether generic statements delivered during a picture-book interaction with their parents influenced 3-year-olds' expectations about members of a novel social category. Our results showed that children who heard generic statements during the picture-book interaction used social-group membership to make inferences about the likely behavior of a novel category member, whereas children who were not exposed to generic statements did not. These findings suggest that as early as 3 years of age, children's expectations about social categories are influenced by generic statements that occur during brief parent-child interactions.
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Citation Excerpt :
Children know that offspring inherit some of their physical traits from their biological parents (Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Hirschfeld, 1995; Solomon et al., 1996). Whether preschool children indeed possess biological understanding has been debated (c.f., Gelman, 2003, 2004; Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Hirschfeld, 1995 vs. Carey, 1985; Keil, 1986; Solomon et al., 1996; Solomon, 2002), and indeed, four-year-olds credit biological parents not only with their offsprings' skin colors but also with the colors of their shirts (Solomon, 2002). By school age, however, children attribute inborn physical traits to their birth parents more selectively (Solomon et al., 1996), and this understanding emerges spontaneously in older children, even when their culture denies the role of biological inheritance (Astuti, 2004).
A large literature suggests that people attribute the inborn properties of living things to their essence. Here, I explore the possibility that the essence of living things must be further embodied, and that this presumption guides intuitive reasoning about all of an organism's inherited properties, physical and psychological. Accordingly, when people reason about agentive living things (animals and humans), they presume that (a) Their essence must exhibit the properties of bodily matter— it must occupy a certain location in space, and it must be comprised of some appropriate organic substance that is anchored in the body; (b) Inborn (essentialized) traits must be embodied, and conversely, embodied traits are likely innate; and (c) The identity of biological kinds and by extension, one's psychological core, are defined by the material properties of their essence. I show that the embodiment hypothesis can capture numerous phenomena, ranging from laypeople's intuitions about which psychological traits are plausibly innate to their perception of the self and its capacity to migrate to humanoids and reemerge after death.
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View full text

Do children have a theory of race?

Abstract

Lingua

Cognition

Cognitive Psychology

Cognition

The development of ethnic self-identification and attitudes

Children and prejudice

Self and ethnic concepts in relation to ethnic constancy

Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science

Human diversity

The nature of prejudice

Speaking with style: the sociolinguistic skills of children

Developing theories of mind

Cognitive foundations of natural history

Core domains versus scientific theories

Belief-desire reasoning among Baka children: evidence for a universal conception of mind

Child development

Racial theories

Children's strategic use of requests to mark and manipulate social status

Genital knowledge and gender constancy in preschool children

Child Development

Ethnobiological classification

Occupational sex-typing by kindergarten and fourth-grade children

Psychological Reports

Genetics, evolution, and man

The correspondence of Jivaroan to scientific ornithology

American Anthropologist

Tradition as truth and communication

Statistical methods in cancer research

Domain-specific principles affect learning and transfer in children

Cognitive Science

Quantitative genetics of human skin color

Yearbook of Physical Anthropology

Perception, appraisal, and emotion: the onset of social referencing

Conceptual development in childhood

The epigenesis of mind: Essays on biology and cognition

Domain specific knowledge and conceptual change

Language and the problems of knowledge: the Managua Lectures

Skin color as a factor in racial identification of Negro pre-school children: a preliminary report

Journal of Experimental Education

Young children's concept of status and role

Sociology of Education

Learning to be prejudiced: growing up in multi-ethnic Britain

Who is black: one nations' definition

Salience and relativity in classification

American Ethnologist

Evidence for a transitional phase in the development of gender constancy

Child Development

The intelligence controversy

Social cognition

Modularity of mind

Japanese children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotions

International Journal of Behavioral Development

What preschoolers know about animate and inanimate objects

Children's use of categories to guide biological inferences

Human Development

Inferring properties from categories versus inferring categories from properties: the case of gender

Child Development

Children's perceptions of occupational sex stereotypes

Sex Roles

Anatomy of racism

Racist culture: philosophy and the politics of meaning

The mismeasure of man

Development of a sense of self-identity in children

Child Development

The idea of race and its elevation to autonomous scientific and legal status

The foundations of primitive thought