Developmental changes in the coherence of essentialist beliefs about psychological characteristics

Essentialism is the belief that certain characteristics (of individuals or categories) may be relatively stable, unchanging, likely to be present at birth, and biologically based. The current studies examined how different essentialist beliefs interrelate. For example, does thinking that a property is innate imply that the property cannot be changed? Four studies were conducted, examining how children (N5 195, grades 1 – 7; ages 7 – 13) and adults (N5 187) reason about familiar and novel social characteristics. By 3rd grade (9 years), children showed some coherence of essentialist beliefs. In contrast, younger children expected less interrelatedness among dimensions than older children or adults. These findings suggest that essentialist attributions at first consist of separate strands that children eventually link together into a more coherent understanding. This article examines how children and adults use essentialist reasoning when considering the psycho-logical characteristics of others. Although essentialist reasoning has been defined in different ways in the literature (see Gelman, 2003; Medin & Ortony, 1989, for a review), for the present purposes we focus on several qualities that are often viewed as central to essentialist thought, including the beliefs that a trait (of a category or of an individual) may be relatively stable, unchanging, likely to be present at birth, or biologically based. For example, someone who is essentialist about ‘‘shyness’ ’ might believe that a child who is shy will be shy his whole life, regardless of environmental circumstances, and that scientists may one day uncover a gene for shyness. Essential-ism is important because it has implications for how people reason about the world. On the positive side, essentialism encourages one to extend knowledge in new ways (e.g., inferring that dwarf hamsters in general have a gestation period of 3 weeks after learning that your pet dwarf hamster has a gestation period of 3 weeks). On the negative side, essential-ism encourages stereotyping of social categories (e.g., inferring that girls are not good at math, after learning that Barbie thinks math is hard). Demoulin