The Development of Social Essentialism
- ISBN-10
- 0128200871
- ISBN-13
- 9780128200872
- Category
- Psychology
- Pages
- 260
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-06-19
- Publisher
- Academic Press
Description
Expecting a gentle baby tiger to inevitably grow up to be ferocious, a young girl growing up in a household of boys to prefer princesses to toy trucks, or that liberals and conservatives are fundamentally different kinds of people, all reflect a conceptual commitment to psychological essentialism. Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to think that some everyday categories reflect the real, underlying, natural structure of the world. Whereas essentialist thought can sometimes be useful, it is often problematic, particularly when people rely on essentialist thinking to understand groups of people, including those based on gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. This Volume will bring together diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives on how essentialist thinking about the social world develops in childhood and on the implications of these beliefs for children’s social behavior and intergroup relations more generally. This volume draws on diverse theoretical perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, and empirical work from experiments with children and cross-cultural studies to provide a comprehensive view of how social essentialism develops. This volume addresses the link between cognition (essentialist beliefs) and social behavior, with implications for prejudice, morality, the justice system, and inter-group relations. By drawing on a diverse evidence base, this volume addresses how beliefs emerge from the interplay among children’s conceptual biases and their social experiences.
Get the book
Similar books
-
The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought
By Susan A. GelmanLittle Prince , The ( Saint - Exupéry ) , 155–178 logical quantifiers , 232–234 multiple individuals , 168–169 two or more individuals , 167–169 See also child - directed speech ; language ; parental language insides , 76–83 , 121-128 ...
-
Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition
By Denis RegnierThis book explores the prejudice against slave descendants in highland Madagascar and its persistence more than a century after the official abolition of slavery. ‘Unclean people’ is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of ...
-
Folkbiology
By Scott Atran, Douglas L. Medinand naming . Children in all three conditions formed the basic level categories successfully . At nonbasic levels , performance varied as a function of condition , and the influence of novel words on object categorization became ...
-
The Metaphysics of Gender
By Charlotte WittKripke, Saul. 1977. “Identity and Necessity.” In Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds, ed. Stephen Schwartz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 66–101. ——— . 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
-
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
By Greg McKeownDo you feel your time is constantly being hijacked by other people's agendas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the way out is the way of the Essentialist. Essentialism isn't about getting more done in less time.
-
The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference
By Ann MorningIncludes bibliographical references (p. 279-303) and index.
-
Mother-Child Conversations about Gender
By Susan A. GelmanThis monograph provides the first in-depth look at how mothers and young children talk about gender, to discover the potential role of language in fostering gender stereotypes. Mothers and their...
-
Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation
By Alison Gopnik, Laura SchulzThis new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist ...
-
What's Left of Human Nature?: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept
By Maria KronfeldnerIn What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism.
-
The Psychology of Extremism: A Motivational Perspective
By Taylor & Francis GroupThis ground-breaking book introduces a new model of extremism that emphasizes motivational imbalance among individual needs, offering a unique multidisciplinary exploration of extreme behaviors relating to terrorism, dieting, sports, love, ...