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Meyer, Meredith; Gelman, Susan A.; Roberts, Steven O.; Leslie, Sarah-Jane – Cognitive Science, 2017
Psychological essentialism is a folk theory characterized by the belief that a causal internal essence or force gives rise to the common outward behaviors or attributes of a category's members. In two studies, we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-old children evidenced essentialist reasoning about heart transplants by asking them to predict…
Descriptors: Heart Disorders, Human Body, Childhood Attitudes, Young Children
Sutherland, Shelbie L.; Cimpian, Andrei; Leslie, Sarah-Jane; Gelman, Susan A. – Cognitive Science, 2015
Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that--beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations--people are "biased" to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit…
Descriptors: Memory, Bias, Generalization, Classification
Brandone, Amanda C.; Gelman, Susan A.; Hedglen, Jenna – Cognitive Science, 2015
Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by "all," "most," and…
Descriptors: Child Development, Intuition, Semantics, Preschool Children
Ware, Elizabeth A.; Gelman, Susan A. – Cognitive Science, 2014
This set of seven experiments examines reasoning about the inheritance and acquisition of physical properties in preschoolers, undergraduates, and biology experts. Participants (N = 390) received adoption vignettes in which a baby animal was born to one parent but raised by a biologically unrelated parent, and they judged whether the offspring…
Descriptors: Vignettes, Adoption, Animals, Genetics
Meyer, Meredith; Leslie, Sarah-Jane; Gelman, Susan A.; Stilwell, Sarah M. – Cognitive Science, 2013
Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Human Body, Donors, Philosophy
Legare, Cristine H.; Gelman, Susan A. – Cognitive Science, 2008
Three studies examined the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5-, 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho-speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were…
Descriptors: Beliefs, Biology, Evolution, Physical Health