Essentialization of Social Categories Across Development in Two Cultures

Telli DavoodiBoston University

Gaye SoleyBo�gazic�i University

Paul L. HarrisHarvard University

Peter R. BlakeBoston University

Children display an “essentialist” bias in their everyday thinking about social categories. However, the degreeand form of this bias varies with age and with the nature of the categories, as well as across cultures. Thisproject investigated the development of the essentialist bias across five social categories (i.e., gender, national-ity, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status (rich/poor), and sports-team supporter) in two countries. Chil-dren between 5 and 10 years of age in Turkey (Study 1, N = 74) and the United States (Study 2, N = 73), aswell as adults in both countries (Study 3, N = 223), participated. Results indicate surprising cross-cultural par-allels with respect to both the rank ordering of essentialist thinking across these five categories and increasingdifferentiation among them over development.

Essentialism is a mode of thinking in which cate-gories are assumed to have a defining essence thatis inherent, intrinsic, immutable, and offers aninductive potential. By around 4 years of age, chil-dren perceive animal categories (and other naturalkinds) in terms of such defining essences. For exam-ple, they believe that a tiger is “born that way,”will be a tiger for life, has tiger “insides,” and that“tigerness” will predict the animal’s traits or behav-ior (Gelman & Wellman, 1991; for a review, seeGelman, 2003). Essentialism may facilitate learningbut may also lead to problematic assumptions,especially about social categories (Gelman &Roberts, 2017; Leslie, 2013; Mayr, 1991). Theories of

the development of psychological essentialism high-light the role of cultural input, as well as a cogni-tive bias to reason about social categories inbiological terms. To examine the role of both fac-tors, cross-cultural comparisons are needed but fewhave been conducted (see Diesendruck, Goldfein-Elbaz, Rhodes, Gelman, & Neumark, 2013). Weassessed the development of children’s essentialistthinking for five social categories (gender, national-ity, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status [SES],sports-team fan) in Turkey (Study 1) and the UnitedStates (Study 2). We also measured adults’ essen-tialist thinking in both countries for these categories(Study 3).

Essentialism

Essentialism encompasses several distinct beliefsabout categories. With respect to the social domain,some researchers have proposed natural-kind essen-tialism—the idea that some social categories areperceived as tied to underlying causes (Haslam,Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000; Prentice & Miller, 2007).This aspect of social essentialism comprises judg-ments about whether category membership is bio-logically based, stable over time, and impervious tothe environment (Keller, 2005), leading to a repre-sentation of social categories as “naturalized”

We appreciate Susan Gelman’s feedback on the use of theappropriate measures. We are grateful to the all the extraordi-nary research assistants who contributed to this work with theirtime, effort, and intellectual input, in Turkey and United States.We especially thank Pınar €Ust€un and Gizem €Unl€u for their extra-human abilities, which made testing possible in Turkey. Wethank Deborah Tan, Akshita Srinivasa, Lucas Ramos Camargo,Santiago Marquez, Claire Park, and R€umeysa €Ozt€urk for theirhelp and support with testing in the United States. We extendour appreciation to all the wonderful parents, children, andundergraduate students who provided us with the opportunityto do research.Parts of this research were supported by a grant from The Scien-tific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (T€UB_ITAK-215K189) and the Science Academy Award (BAGEP) to GayeSoley and funds from Boston University’s Clara Mayo MemorialAward Fellowship to Telli Davoodi. Funding sources had noinvolvement in study design, data collection, analysis, data inter-pretation, writing of the report, or the submission processes.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toTelli Davoodi, Boston University, 621 Commonwealth Ave. Room309 Boston, MA 02215. Electronic mail may be sent to telli@bu.edu.

© 2019 Society for Research in Child DevelopmentAll rights reserved. 0009-3920/2019/xxxx-xxxxDOI: 10.1111/cdev.13209

Child Development, xxxx 2019, Volume 00, Number 0, Pages 1–18

(Haslam et al., 2000) or as “pseudo-natural kinds”(Boyer, 1993). Although natural-kind beliefs aboutsocial categories may be empirically false, as in thecase of race, they influence behavior and attitudestoward various social groups (Haslam & Whelan,2008). Therefore, understanding how social cate-gories are essentialized has implications for moraldevelopment and intergroup cognition.

To measure natural-kind beliefs about social cat-egories, we used a series of questions that have suc-cessfully captured variation in children’s essentialistbeliefs about psychological characteristics (Gelman,Heyman, & Legare, 2007) as well as beliefs andopinions (Heiphetz, Gelman, & Young, 2017). Thus,we asked questions about the biological basis forgroup differences (i.e., differences in the brain,blood, and at birth), the possibility for change ingroup membership (e.g., can a boy become a girl),and the influence of the environment in determininggroup membership. These three dimensions havebeen proposed as aspects of natural-kind essential-ism that vary across particular categories (Gelmanet al., 2007).

Cultural Variation

The ability to essentialize social categories may beuniversal, but in any given society, the social groupsthat are essentialized and the degree of essentializa-tion that occurs can be learned. Prior research showsthat adults tend to hold essentialist beliefs aboutgender, race, ethnicity, and social class (Haslamet al., 2000; Mahalingam, 2003; Prentice & Miller,2007; Smiler & Gelman, 2008). Indeed, notions ofsocial essences are evident in diverse societies (Gel-man & Hirschfeld, 1999; Mauss, 1954), suggesting auniversal tendency. However, culture also shapesessentialist beliefs about social categories. For exam-ple, in U.S. urban and rural communities, 5- and 7-year olds treat gender as a natural category, buturban 10- and 17-year olds show fewer essentialistbeliefs about gender than their rural peers (Rhodes& Gelman, 2009). In Israel, first and fifth gradersessentialize various social categories to differentdegrees based on whether they are from secular orreligious families (Diesendruck & Haber, 2009).

Studies in different cultures also reveal differentpatterns with respect to the development of essen-tialist beliefs for specific social categories based onthe salience, meaning, and social construction ofthose categories (Astuti, Solomon, & Carey, 2004;Birnbaum, Deeb, Segall, Ben-Eliyahu, & Diesen-druck, 2010; Deeb, Segall, Birnbaum, Ben-Eliyahu,& Diesendruck, 2011; del R�ıo & Strasser, 2011;

Diesendruck & Haber, 2009; Rhodes & Gelman,2009; Waxman, 2012). For example, essentialistbeliefs about race (Black and White) decrease withage in Israel but increase with age in the UnitedStates (Diesendruck et al., 2013). Children in theUnited States essentialize Arab and Jewish ethnicitymore with age, but in Israel the groups are essen-tialized from kindergarten, presumably due to thesalience of the ongoing conflict between the twogroups in that society.

To identify the cultural factors driving essential-ist beliefs for particular social categories, direct cul-tural comparisons are needed. Yet, to ourknowledge, the study by Diesendruck et al. (2013),described earlier, is the only study that makes sucha comparison. Comparisons of cultures and cate-gories that differ along identifiable dimensions areespecially informative. In the current study, wecompare five social categories (gender, nationality,religion, SES, and sports-team fan) that are likely todiffer in the extent to which they are essentializedin terms of natural-kind beliefs. Turkey and theUnited States vary in terms of the tension betweengroups within some of these social categories. Morespecifically, they differ in terms of religion (Islam,Christianity), the history of nationalist conflict, andgender relations. Following, we consider the rele-vance of these differences for theories of the devel-opment and expression of social essentialism.

Turkey and the United States

Turkey is a country with a majority Muslim andethnic Turk population (see Konda, 2011; WorldValues Survey Association, 2011). However, manyother ethnic and religious groups are representedand there has been tension among these groupsthroughout Turkey’s history (Kiris�ci & Winrow,1997; Moudouros, 2014). An emphasis on a com-mon national identity (being a Turk) after the estab-lishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923coincided with an increase in ethnic conflict (Boz-do�gan & Kasaba, 1997; Kiris�ci & Winrow, 1997).Nationality and ethnicity are still highly conflictualcategories. Indeed, there has been a rise in national-istic sentiment and ethnic conflict in recent years(Bilali, Celik, & Ok, 2014; Konda, 2011; Sarac�o�glu,2009). Children are exposed to an emphasis onTurkish identity and nationalistic values in theirdaily lives and via the educational system (Kaya,2009). In combination, these social factors may leadto increased essentialist beliefs about nationality.Given the sensitive nature of ethnic conflict withinTurkey (Turk vs. Kurd), we focused on nationality.

2 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake

We used a comparable contrast in the UnitedStates. Because testing occurred before the recentrise in nationalistic sentiment in the United States,it is plausible that essentialist beliefs for thiscategory will be lower in the United States than inTurkey.

Gender is also a highly salient category in Turkey.Although the gender hierarchy and distinct genderroles are less apparent in educated, urbanized fami-lies, contemporary Turkish society may be character-ized as patriarchal (Fis�ek & Sunar, 2005; Ka�gıtc�ıbas�ı& Sunar, 1992). According to the World Values Sur-vey in 2011, 76% of people interviewed in Turkeyagreed that, “when jobs are scarce, men should havemore right to a job than women,” whereas only 5.7%agreed in the United States. Likewise, 66% ofrespondents in Turkey agreed that, “when a motherworks for pay, the children suffer,” whereas only25% agreed in the United States.

Our data were collected in Istanbul and Boston.Even in the city of Istanbul, arguably the mostmodern city in Turkey, attitudes toward gender dif-fer from attitudes reported by adults in New Eng-land. Drilling into the same World Values SurveyAssociation (2011) questions, 51% of polled resi-dents from Istanbul agreed that, “when jobs arescarce, men should have more right to a job thanwomen,” but only 7.5% of residents of New Eng-land in the United States did so. In Istanbul, 49.7%of adults agreed that, “when a mother works forpay, the children suffer” and 62.1% agreed that,“on the whole, men make better political leadersthan women do”; in New England, however, only19.8% agreed with the former statement and only13.2% agreed with the latter. These stark differencesin attitudes toward gender are likely to make thatcategory more salient in Turkey compared to theUnited States resulting in stronger essentialistbeliefs about gender in Turkey.

The role of, and exposure to, religion, is also dif-ferent in Turkish and U.S. urban society. Turkey isa Muslim majority country (over 90% in Istanbul,World Values Survey Association, 2011) whereSunni Islam is taught in schools (Kaya, 2009). In theUnited States, Christianity is the dominant religionbut it accounts for only about half of the populationin New England (51%, World Values Survey Asso-ciation, 2011). Also, most children attend publicschools with no formal religious education. Thus,compared to Turkish children, U.S. children aremore likely to encounter members of differentfaiths. These cross-national differences in exposureto variation within the social category of religionshould tend to increase essentialization among

Turkish children but decrease it among U.S. chil-dren (see Deeb et al., 2011; Smyth, Feeney, Eidson,& Coley, 2017 for the role of exposure to diversityin decreasing essentialist beliefs).

Even 5-year olds essentialize differences inwealth in both Chile (del R�ıo & Strasser, 2011) andIsrael (Diesendruck & HaLevi, 2006). Children fromwealthy families in Chile were more likely thanpoorer children to believe that wealth status isfixed, suggesting that children learn these beliefsfrom adults. U.S. adults tend to overestimate thepossibility of upward income mobility (Kraus &Tan, 2015) and children may be exposed to thesebeliefs, thereby weakening essentialist beliefs aboutSES. Turkish parents also expect upward economicmobility according to recent survey data (PewResearch Center, 2017). Combined, the limitedevidence suggests that Turkish and U.S. childrenwill essentialize SES status less than other socialcategories.

Theories of Social Essentialism

In light of these cultural differences, we contrasttwo different theoretical approaches to the develop-ment of essentialism, one emphasizing that childrenwill interpret particular social categories in light oftheir cultural and social experiences, and the otheremphasizing that children will bring biologicallybased assumptions to their interpretation of socialcategories. The two approaches are not mutuallyexclusive, but they do focus on differentmechanisms.

Cultural Salience of Categories

Cultural variability in the development of essen-tialist beliefs about social categories suggests thatlocal experience helps to shape these beliefs. Hence,as children learn about social categories in theircommunities, they will essentialize different groupsto different degrees. One possible reason for thisvariation concerns the existence of social anomalies(Gelman & Hirschfeld, 1999). Children will learnabout the differential treatment of particular socialgroups (e.g., discrimination based on gender, race,or ethnicity) or about conflict between particulargroups and use essentialist thinking as a causalexplanation. For example, Israeli children havestronger essentialist beliefs about ethnicity (i.e., Jew-ish and Arab ethnicity) than U.S. children (Diesen-druck et al., 2013). Also, when novel groups arepresented in an experimental setting as being incompetition, even 4-year olds are more likely to

Social Essentialism Across Culture and Age 3

view the groups as essentially different (Rhodes &Brickman, 2011). By implication, the “anomaly” ofdiscrimination or conflict is explained by assumingthat the relevant groups are inherently different,and, therefore, “naturally” in conflict with oneanother. In sum, the cultural salience account pre-dicts that essentialist beliefs about specific socialcategories (e.g., ethnicity) will follow differentdevelopmental trajectories in different cultureswhen conflict or discrimination between groupswithin a given social category (e.g., Arab and Jew)is salient.

A different, culturally based explanation of suchvariation is that children are likely to make infer-ences based on their exposure to within-group vari-ability and also to people changing their socialgroup. Learning about individual differences withina given social category or exposure to shiftsbetween groups may weaken the essentialist beliefthat a category is natural, immutable, or predictive.Consistent with this claim, Deeb et al. (2011) foundthat children attending integrated Jewish/Arabschools in Israel had weaker essentialist beliefsabout ethnicity than peers attending Jewish- orArab-only schools. Smyth et al. (2017) found similareffects for children attending Catholic/Protestantintegrated schools in Northern Ireland. Presumably,integrated programs lead children to realize thatpeople can vary within a category leading toweaker beliefs about the role of “essences” in deter-mining category membership. Adult testimony canalso influence the development of essentialistbeliefs. For example, Segall, Birnbaum, Deeb, andDiesendruck (2015) documented a reliable associa-tion between parents’ speech and children’s essen-tialist beliefs about ethnicity in Israel. Smyth et al.(2017) also argued for the contribution of parentalinput in explaining the decrease in essentialistbeliefs about religion among children attendingintegrated schools in Northern Ireland.

In sum, according to the cultural salience account,the development of specific essentialist beliefsdepends on cultural and contextual factors. Hence,differences between Turkey and United States inthe social salience of the categories included in ourstudy, will impact the essentialization of those cate-gories. Variation should be especially evident forbeliefs about gender, nationality, and religion, giventhe cultural differences highlighted earlier.

Perception of Categories as Biologically Relevant

Other accounts of essentialism suggest thatessentialism is a product of intuitive theories about

the biological domain that have evolved to supportbiological understanding (Atran, 1998; Gil-White,2002). A strong version of the folk-biological accountof essentialism suggests that essentialist beliefsshould apply only to those social categories whereclear biological markers exist and that variousdimensions of biological thinking should be trig-gered simultaneously. However, ample evidenceshows both assumptions to be false. First, categorieswith no clear biological markers, such as SES andReligion, are prone to essentialist thinking in somecommunities (del R�ıo & Strasser, 2011; Diesendruck& HaLevi, 2006; see Rhodes & Mandalaywala,2017). Second, dimensions of essentialist thinkingdo not necessarily cohere, especially in children, atleast in the case of reasoning about psychologicalproperties (Gelman et al., 2007). Thus, essentialismis not limited to the biological representation ofcategories.

Stepping away from a strong, domain-specificaccount of essentialist reasoning, social categoriesthat are represented as having biological underpin-nings may be prone to stronger essentialist beliefswith more convergence among different dimensionsof essentialism. This possibility need not imply thatobservable biological markers (i.e., skin color,accent) must be present for essentialist reasoning tobe triggered. It allows for a variety of triggers butstresses the special role of biological thinking.Indeed, testimony and linguistic cues (e.g., generics)can signal which categories should be understood asbiologically relevant (Gelman & Roberts, 2017).When a biological marker can be used to differenti-ate groups, and cultural input reinforces that differ-entiation, a biologically based account of essentialism predicts that relevant social groups will behighly essentialized and that various dimensions ofessentialist thinking will converge. For example,gender will be highly essentialized in most culturalcontexts because biological markers exist and gen-der is a culturally relevant social category in mostmodern societies. We will refer to such categoriesas having biological relevance in a given culture.

To provide evidence for this biological relevanceaccount, two levels of comparison are needed. First,within cultures, a hierarchy should be observed inthe strength of essentialist beliefs about differentsocial categories: biologically relevant categoriesshould be strongly essentialized and categories withno clear biological relevance should be weaklyessentialized. Second, social categories perceived asbiologically relevant should be similarly essential-ized across different cultures. Third, essentialistbeliefs about categories perceived as biologically

4 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake

relevant should emerge around 4 years of age,when children start reasoning about biological cate-gories as richly structured and defined by discreteboundaries (Rhodes, Gelman, & Karuza, 2014). Bycontrast, essentialist beliefs about categories withno clear biological relevance should emerge later indevelopment and undergo developmental changesover time, given their dependence on cultural input.Next, we review the specific predictions made byeach account.

Predictions

If the biological relevance account is correct, thecategory of gender will be essentialized morestrongly than other categories in Turkey and theUnited States. However, given that gender is bothbiologically marked and culturally relevant in bothcountries, this account does not predict a starkcross-cultural difference in how strongly gender isessentialized. By contrast, the cultural salienceaccount predicts that Turkish children will essen-tialize gender more strongly than U.S. childrenespecially in the course of development, due to thegreater emphasis on distinct gender roles in Tur-key. Also, on the cultural salience account, culturaldifferences should be observed in essentialistbeliefs about religion since U.S. children will beexposed to more religious diversity. Indeed, thecultural salience account predicts that gender,nationality, and religion should be highly essential-ized, and possibly to the same degree, in Turkeydue to social salience of all three categories viaseveral mechanisms, including intergroup conflictin the case of nationality, and exposure to Islamicideology and teachings in schools in the case ofreligion.

For nationality, the biological relevance accountpredicts high essentialization in both countries. Thisis due to quasi-biological markers, such as languageand/or accent, reinforced by the cultural relevanceof nationality, with respect to what it means to be aTurk or an American. Given these common fea-tures, there should not be a stark difference in chil-dren’s beliefs about nationality in the two countriesand little developmental change would be expected.By contrast, religion, SES, and sports-team fanshould not be highly essentialized in either countrygiven the paucity of biological markers. Thus, forthese three categories, the biological relevance accountpredicts a low level of essentialist beliefs thatremains stable over development or even a sharpdecline given that these categories have no appar-ent biological underpinning. In contrast, for SES,

the cultural salience account predicts greater essen-tialization with age in both countries as childrenare exposed to social and class stratification,although this may not be apparent in the age rangetested. By contrast, children may initially essential-ize sports-team fans but this should decrease withage as children learn that these affiliations arepotentially variable.

Biologically oriented accounts of essentialismpredict coherence among the different dimensionsof essentialist thinking. However, because thedimensions that we measured have not been testedacross the five social categories described here, wehad no strong a priori predictions regarding thepatterns of the dimensions for each category. Weinclude an analysis of these dimensions in the Sup-porting Information to facilitate interpretation ofthe key results.

The Current Study

In Study 1, we compared essentialist thinkingabout the social categories of gender, nationality,religion, SES, and sports-team fan groups amongTurkish children in Turkey. We aimed to test thepredictions of the two models of essentialist reason-ing regarding the relative strength and develop-mental trajectory of essentialist beliefs. In Study 2,we measured essentialist beliefs about the same cat-egories among U.S. children and in Study 3, wecompared adults’ essentialist thinking about thesecategories in both countries.

Given the limited cross-cultural research on thedevelopment of social essentialism, we based theage range and sample size on Diesendruck et al.(2013), the most comparable study to date. Theseresearchers tested children in two age groups,approximately 5–6 years of age and 9–11 years ofage, in Israel (N = 58) and the United States(N = 51), and found developmental changes in bothcountries for certain social categories. To obtain amore detailed analysis of developmental change,we included children between 5 and 10 years ofage. Our primary analyses treated age as a continu-ous variable, and we increased the within-countrysample sizes relative to Diesendruck et al. (2013) byapproximately one third. We reasoned that thisincrease in sample size would allow us to detectmoderate age by category interactions. Thus, weplanned to recruit 75 children in each country, withthe ages spread as evenly as possible within theconstraints of the testing sites (i.e., schools). Thefinal child samples were N = 74 in Turkey andN = 73 in the United States.

Social Essentialism Across Culture and Age 5

Study 1—Istanbul, Turkey

Method

Participants

Seventy-four children between 5 and 10 years ofage (M = 7.90, SD = 1.55, 43 females) participatedin Study 1. An additional six children wereexcluded because they were a year or more olderthan the target age range (N = 5) or lacked birth-date information (N = 1). The final sample con-sisted of: 5- to 6-year olds (N = 18), 7- to 8-yearolds (N = 25), 9- to 10-year olds (N = 31).

In Turkey, asking parents to identify their race/ethnicity is a sensitive issue and so instead weasked about languages spoken at home. We usedthis language information as an indirect measure ofethnicity; 66% of the parents indicated “only Turk-ish” or “Turkish” and another nonethnic language(e.g., English); 20% indicated a variety of languagesspoken by ethnic minorities in Turkey (i.e., Kurdish,Georgian, Arabic, Russian); for 14% this informa-tion was not available.

All children lived in Istanbul and were recruitedfrom summer school programs and cultural centers.Most came from lower-middle or middle socioeco-nomic backgrounds, as they visited tuition-free cul-tural centers in lower-middle and middle SESneighborhoods. We did not collect data from fami-lies on their religious identity, but testing took placein majority Muslim neighborhoods of Istanbul. Thestudy was approved by a local university institu-tional review board.

Design

Children were tested individually in quiet roomsat cultural centers or summer school camps. Theywere shown five pairs of characters in a randomorder, for a total of five trials, each pair represent-ing one of the five social categories of interest: Gen-der, Nationality, Religion, SES, and Sports-TeamsFan (see Figure S1). In addition, all children firstviewed one character for a brief warm-up trial. Allcategories were illustrated with generic, same-gen-der characters (except for the category of gender),gender-matched with the participant, on a whitebackground. All characters were referred to by let-ters of the alphabet to prevent prior experiencewith actual names influencing children’s response.The letters were selected after piloting in each coun-try. For each category, two characters representingmembers of two groups within that category werepresented, and each character was labeled as a

member of one of two groups. For gender, onecharacter was labeled as a boy, the other as a girl.For religion, one was labeled a Muslim, the other aChristian. For nationality, one was labeled a Turk,the other a Macedonian. (Note that “Macedonian”can also refer to an ethnic group within Turkey, butwhen children asked, Macedonians were describedas “people who live in Macedonia”). For SES, onewas labeled as poor, the other as rich, and forsports team, each character was labeled as fans ofone of the three most popular soccer teams in Istan-bul, “Fenerbahc�e,” “Galatasaray,” and “Bes�iktas�.”Slight visual variations between the characters sig-naled their group membership (Figure S1).

Children’s parents completed a short question-naire, indicating their gender, favorite soccer team,age, education level, monthly income, and occupa-tion, as well as languages (other than Turkish) spo-ken at home and their child’s gender. Childrenwere asked about their favorite soccer team ver-bally before the experiment. Questions about reli-gion or ethnicity were not asked directly, asrequested by the local collaborators and administra-tors where testing occurred.

The materials were first drafted in English,revised after several consultations with Turkish col-laborators and finalized in English, then translatedinto Turkish by a graduate student living in Istan-bul, fluent in both Turkish and English. The Turk-ish translations were then revised based on pilottesting sessions, and back-translated into English bythe same graduate student and the second author.All testing was conducted with the final Turkishtranslations.

Procedure

Children were told that they would be shownpictures of various people and asked questionsabout them. Before the warm-up trial, childrenwere also told that they could answer all the ques-tions with “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” In the warm-up trial, the experimenter labeled a character with aletter name and asked children if they thought thecharacter “goes to school” and “likes ice cream.”No feedback was given, because the warm-up ques-tions were simply to familiarize children with therange of possible answers. Children then receivedfive trials in random order, each corresponding toone of the five social categories. For each trial, theexperimenter labeled each character in the pair asbelonging to a group from the relevant social cate-gory. For example, for the category of religion, theexperimenter labeled one as a Muslim and the other

6 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake

as a Christian. Order of labeling and left–right posi-tion was randomized. Children answered five ques-tions about the characters, focusing on differentdimensions of essentialist thinking. Prior to testing,we created 14 random orders for the five questionsfor use within the three age groups. Each partici-pant received the same question order for all socialcategories.

The five questions were asked about two indi-viduals belonging to two different groups. Forexample, in the case of individuals from two reli-gious groups, Muslim and Christian, childrenwere asked whether: (a) their brains are differentfrom one another; (b) whether their blood carriesinformation about their religious affiliation; (c)whether they were born with their religious affili-ations, (d) whether they can change their religiousaffiliation, and (e) whether being affiliated with acertain religion is because of their environment.The five questions were based on prior researchon different dimensions of the natural-kind aspectof essentialist thinking (Gelman et al., 2007; seeSupporting Information for the exact wording ofquestions). Children received a score of 1 forevery essentialist response. For the born, blood, andbrain questions, the essentialist response is “yes”;these three questions were coded as 1 for “yes,” 0for “no,” and 0.5 for “maybe.” For the change andenvironment questions, the essentialist response is“no”; these were reverse coded (i.e., 0 for “yes,” 1for “no,” and 0.5 for “maybe” response). Thiscoding scheme is based on prior work (Gelmanet al., 2007; Heiphetz et al., 2017). Responses werelive-coded by the experimenter, and checkedagainst the coding sheet by two researchassistants.

After completing these five questions, childrenwere asked two control questions about whethereach character has a lot of friends. These questionswere included to assess children’s possible biastoward either of the two characters. They alsoserved as fillers before questions about a new cate-gory (a new pair of characters) were asked. Foreach of the control questions, children received ascore of 1 for a “yes” response, 0.5 for “maybe,”and 0 for a “no” response.

For each participant, a total essentialism score fora given social group was calculated by summingup the participant’s scores across the five individualessentialism questions (a range of 0–5). Results arefirst presented in terms of participants’ total essen-tialism scores across the five dimensions and thenin terms of the individual dimensions of essentialistreasoning.

Results

All analyses of the essentialism scores were car-ried out using R statistical software (version 3.4.3,R Core Team, 2017). Following, we report our pri-mary analysis of children’s essentialist beliefs forthe five categories. Next, we examine the effect ofage on children’s differentiation between the cate-gories, and the effect of age on children’s essential-ist beliefs for each category, separately. Lastly, weanalyze the individual dimensions of essentialismby age and category. Whenever multiple compar-isons were conducted, we used a Bonferroni adjust-ment as described in each section. The means andstandard errors of the essentialism scores for eachcategory within each age group are presented inSupporting Information (Table S1).

Comparing Essentialist Beliefs by Category and Age?

Figure 1a shows children’s essentialist beliefs abouteach category over age. In order to assess how partici-pants of all ages differentiated among the five socialcategories, we first ran mixed-effects, linear regressionmodels on children’s total essentialism scores, withAge (in years) as a continuous variable, Category as acategorical fixed effect, and Participant as a randomeffect (nlme package in R, Pinheiro, Bates, DebRoy, &Sarkar, 2014). The overall model showed no effect ofAge, F(1, 72) = 0.23, p = .63, and a main effect of Cat-egory, F(1, 291) = 43.82, p < .001. We next comparedchildren’s essentialist beliefs about each category totheir beliefs about the other categories using plannedpost hoc comparisons and resetting the reference levelcategory. We used a Bonferroni correction to accountfor these four comparisons, a = .0125 (note that onlyfour models are needed to cover all possible compar-isons between the five levels of Category). Controllingfor age, children differentiated between all categories,with the exception of SES and religion (Table S2). Fig-ure 1a illustrates this main effect of category: childrenstrongly essentialized Gender, followed by National-ity, Religion/SES, and Teams.

Next, we added the interaction of Age 9 Categoryto the mixed-effects, linear regression models fromabove in order to compare the category effects overdevelopment. The overall model showed no maineffect of Age, F(1, 72) = 0.23, p = .63, a main effect ofCategory, F(4, 287) = 44.67, p < .001, and a significanteffect of the interaction term, F(4, 287) = 2.42,p = .049. We ran four post hoc tests to examine theinteraction of Age and children’s essentialist beliefsfor each category. Comparing the interaction effectsfor each category required resetting the reference

Social Essentialism Across Culture and Age 7

level for Category four times. We used a Bonferronicorrection to account for these four tests, a = .0125.The results (Figure 1a and Table 1) showed that chil-dren increasingly differentiated between certain cate-gories in terms of the degree of essentialization.Specifically, the difference between the most highlyessentialized category (Gender) and the least essen-tialized category (Teams) increased with age. Noother interaction contrasts were significant.

Do Essentialist Beliefs About Each Category ChangeWith Age?

The models in Table 1 show the relative effect ofage on children’s essentialist beliefs for each

category compared to a reference category. Toexamine the effect of age on children’s essentialismscores for each category, we ran five linear regres-sion models, one for each social category, with Age(in years) as a continuous predictor. For all regres-sion models, we mean-centered Age; the interceptcan be interpreted as the expected essentialismscore at the mean age of our sample (7.90 years).Because we ran five separate models, we used aBonferroni adjustment and compared observed pvalues against a = .01. Age did not predict chil-dren’s essentialism scores for any of the categoriesseparately (see Table S3 for model parameters ofeach category). Thus, the conservative interpreta-tion is that essentialism scores for each category

0

1

2

3

4

5

Gender Nationality SES Religion Teams

Tota

l Ess

entia

lizat

ion

Scor

e

TurkeyU.S.

(a) Turkey, Children (b) U.S., Children

(c) Adults

0

1

2

3

4

5

5 6 7 8 9 10Age (in years)

Esse

ntia

lizat

ion Category

GenderNationalityReligionSESTeams

0

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2

3

4

5

5 6 7 8 9 10Age (in years)

Esse

ntia

li zat

ion Category

GenderNationalityReligionSESTeams

Figure 1. Total essentialism scores for children by age and social category—Turkey (a) and United States (b), and adults’ (c) totalessentialism scores by social category and country. SES = socioeconomic status.

8 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake

considered separately remained stable with age inTurkey.

We also investigated the extent to which differ-ent dimensions of essentialist beliefs converge ordiverge in the course of development for each cate-gory. However, due to space limitations, these anal-yses are presented in Supporting Information(Additional Analyses, Part B).

Discussion

The results from the Turkish sample allow aninitial assessment of the two theories of socialessentialism outlined earlier. Children demonstratedstrong essentialist beliefs about gender, followed bynationality, religion, SES, and teams. Furthermore,with age, children differentiated between genderand the least essentialized category, teams. Thedimensions of essentialist reasoning were morelikely to converge over development for the cate-gories of gender, nationality and, to some extent,religion than for the categories of SES and teams.

These findings are only partially consistent withthe predictions of the cultural salience account.Beliefs about the categories of gender and national-ity were highly essentialized and remained soacross age, but children did not differentiate essen-tialist beliefs about religion from other categoriesand no increase occurred with age. Essentialistbeliefs about teams were stable but specific beliefs

about being born a fan of a particular teamdeclined markedly with age.

The results align more closely with the predic-tions of the biological relevance theory. In particular,religious groups were essentialized less than genderand nationality, which both have quasi-biologicalfeatures. In addition, the most essentialized category(gender) and the least (teams) became more differen-tiated with age. Children may conceive of the cate-gory of gender as having a stronger biologicalunderpinning than sports-team affiliation, a categorythat is based on personal preferences. Such biologi-cally oriented thinking would lead to high levels ofessentialist belief for gender at all ages (see Gil-White, 2002 for a related argument about ethnicity).Indeed, the individual dimensions cohered morestrongly for gender than for other categories, andremained highly essentialized over development.Nationality, which can be marked by quasi-biologi-cal cues such as language or accent, was also morehighly essentialized than the other categories andthe dimensions of essentialism cohered morestrongly than for Teams. For teams, the dimensionsof essentialism also diverged with age.

To further assess the two theoretical views, weconducted Study 2 with children in the UnitedStates, using the same social categories and mea-sure of essentialism. As noted in the introduction,the United States and Turkey differ in terms of his-torical and contemporary tensions between groups

Table 1The Effect of Age, Category, and Age 9 Category Interaction Term on Children’s Essentialist Beliefs in Turkey

Reference level for category

Gender Nationality Religion SES

Intercept 3.13 (.61)*** 2.92 (.61)*** 3.73 (.61)*** 3.15 (.62)***Age 0.11 (.07 0.06 (.07) �0.09 (.07) �0.06 (.08)CategoryNationality �0.22 (.76)Religion 0.59 (.76) 0.81 (.76)SES 0.02 (.77) 0.23 (.77) �0.58 (.77)Teams 0.13 (.76) 0.35 (.76) �0.46 (.76) 0.12 (.77)

InteractionAge 9 Nationality �0.04 (.10)Age 9 Religion �0.19 (.09) �0.15 (.09)Age 9 SES �0.16 (.09) �0.12 (.09) 0.03 (.09)Age 9 Teams �0.24 (.09)* �0.20 (.09) �0.05 (.09) �0.08 (.09)

Number of observations 369Number of groups 74Conditional R2 .44

Note. Bonferroni adjustments were applied. All fixed effects shown here vary among models because they are compared to thereference level for category, which is different in each model. SES = socioeconomic status.*p < .0125. ***p < .0001.

Social Essentialism Across Culture and Age 9

within particular social categories. For example,gender and religion are less salient categories in theUnited States than Turkey. However, if some cate-gories are conceived as biologically relevant, chil-dren in both countries should essentialize thosecategories (e.g., gender and nationality) morestrongly than others.

Study 2—Boston, United States

Method

Participants

Seventy-three children between 5 and 10 years ofage (M = 7.34, SD = 1.70, 39 females) participatedin the study. Two additional children wereexcluded either because they did not complete thestudy (N = 1) or were a year older than the targetage range (N = 1). The final sample was as follows:5- to 6-year olds (N = 25), 7- to 8-year olds(N = 25), 9- to 10-year olds (N = 23).

Sixty-two percent of the parents identified theirchildren as “White—not of Hispanic origin,” 4% as“Black/African American,” 4% “Hispanic,” 3% asAsian/Pacific Islander, 3% as South Asian/Indian,14% were identified as mixed-race (“White” andother), 5% “Other,” and 4% chose not to answerthis question. Children in the United States werevisitors to a science museum in Boston, recruitedfrom a local school, or tested in a university lab.Most children were tested at the museum and camefrom lower-middle to upper-middle SES back-grounds (Soren, 2009).

Design

Children were tested in a quiet area of themuseum, school or lab. Parents completed a ques-tionnaire indicating their child’s gender, ethnicity,religion, and favorite baseball team, and their owneducation level, occupation, ethnicity, religion, andfavorite baseball team.

The design of the study was the same as in Study1. The same characters were used with the exceptionof the sports-team fans, who were illustrated wear-ing the jerseys of two relevant baseball teams (seeFigure S2). For the categories of gender, religion,and SES, the characters were labeled as in Study 1.For nationality, the characters were labeled as Amer-ican and British in order to present the same kind ofcontrast as in Study 1: people who look similar, butare labeled differently in terms of their nationality.For the category of sport-team fans, the characters

were labeled as fans of two popular baseball teams,the Red Sox and the Yankees.

Procedure

All procedures were the same as in Study 1. Thefirst author was present during all testing sessionsin both studies to ensure that the same procedureswere used.

Results

Comparing Essentialist Beliefs by Category and Age?

The data were analyzed in the same way as inStudy 1, using mixed-effects, linear regression mod-els. Figure 1b shows the developmental pattern ofU.S. children’s total essentialism scores for the fivesocial categories tested (see Table S4 for means andstandard errors for each Age group). To assess howchildren differentiated among the five categories interms of essentialist beliefs, we first ran mixed-effects, linear regression models with Age and Cate-gory as fixed effects, and Participant ID as a ran-dom effect. The overall model showed a nearsignificant effect of Age, F(1, 71) = 3.77, p = .056,and a main effect of Category, F(4, 288) = 64.54,p < .001. As in Study 1, we ran four post hoc mod-els resetting the reference level category, using aBonferroni correction to account for these fourcomparisons, a = .0125. As shown in Table S5, con-trolling for age, children differentiated between allcategories, with the exception of Nationality andReligion (Table S5). As confirmed by Figure 1b,children strongly essentialized Gender, followed byNationality/Religion, SES, and Teams.

Next, we included the Age 9 Category interac-tion term in the models to investigate how childrendifferentiate between the categories over develop-ment. Table 2 shows the parameters of the modelwhen setting each level of Category as a referenceand applying a Bonferroni correction. As shown inFigure 1b, children increasingly differentiatedamong certain categories with age. Specifically, chil-dren increasingly differentiated Gender, Nationalityand Religion from SES and Teams with age but therelationship between SES and Teams did notchange.

Do Essentialist Beliefs About Each Category ChangeWith Age?

To test whether essentialist beliefs varied withage, we ran five mixed-effects regression models,

10 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake

one for each social category, centering Age (inyears). Table S6 in Supporting Information showsthe parameters. A Bonferroni correction wasapplied to account for the five tests. From 5 to10 years of age, children’s essentialist beliefs signifi-cantly increased for Gender (B = .15, SE = .05,p < .01), decreased for SES and Teams, (B = �.26,SE = .06, p < .001 and B = �.35, SE = .06, p < .001,respectively) and remained unchanged for Religionand Nationality.

Finally, we investigated the extent to which dif-ferent dimensions of essentialist beliefs converge ordiverge in the course of development for each cate-gory included in our study. These analyses are pre-sented in Supporting Information (AdditionalAnalyses, Part B).

Comparison of Turkey and United States

As suggested by Figures 1a and 1b, there werestriking similarities, as well as some noteworthydifferences, between Turkey and the United Statesin the development of children’s essentialist think-ing about the five social categories. To comparethese effects across countries, we ran five linearregression models, one for each social category,investigating the effect of Country, Age, and theCountry 9 Age interaction term (see Table S9). Theresults revealed no main effects or interactioneffects between Country and Age for any of the

categories, with Bonferroni corrections applied.Thus, despite the apparent differences in Figures 1aand 1b, children’s essentialist beliefs (all dimensionscombined) about the five categories were not statis-tically different between the two countries.

Discussion

The results of Study 2 reveal striking similaritiesbetween the United States and Turkey. In bothcountries, the rank order of the categories was simi-lar, children essentialized gender more than othercategories and differentiation among the categoriesoccurred over development, although this patternwas more evident in the United States. This patternsupports the biological relevance account: some cat-egories will be highly essentialized due to apparentbiological markers which can be further endorsedby cultural factors. In support of this interpretation,the individual dimensions of essentialist beliefsabout gender and nationality cohered more stronglyin both countries compared to the least essential-ized category of sports-team fan. In addition, thepattern of essentialization for religion was similarin the two countries, despite clear cultural differ-ences in religious diversity and salience.

In Study 3, we compared essentialist beliefsabout the same five categories among adults in Tur-key and the United States If children essentializethe categories of gender and nationality more than

Table 2The Effect of Age, Category, and Age 9 Category Interaction Term on Children’s Essentialist Beliefs in the United States

Reference level

Gender Nationality Religion SES

Intercept 2.98 (.46)*** 2.97 (.46)*** 3.23 (.46)*** 4.41 (.46)***Age 0.15 (.06) 0.06 (.06) �0.02 (.06) �0.26 (.06)***CategoryNationality �0.01 (.52)Religion 0.25 (.52) 0.26 (.52)SES 1.43 (.52)* 1.44 (.52)* 1.18 (.52)Teams 1.79 (.52)** 1.80 (.52)*** 1.54 (.52)* 0.36 (.52)

InteractionAge 9 Nationality �0.09 (.07)Age 9 Religion �0.17 (.07) �0.07 (.07)Age 9 SES �0.41 (.07)*** �0.31 (.07)*** �0.24 (.07)**Age 9 Teams �0.50 (.07)*** �0.41 (.07)*** �0.33 (.07)*** �0.10 (.07)

Number of observations 365Number of groups 73Conditional R2 .63

Note. Bonferroni adjustments were applied. All fixed effects shown here vary among models because they are compared to thereference level for Category, which is different in each model. SES = socioeconomic status.*p < .0125. **p < .001. ***p < .0001.

Social Essentialism Across Culture and Age 11

others because they appear to reflect a biologicalessence, then U.S. and Turkish adults should alsoessentialize these categories more than other socialcategories.

Study 3—Adults

In Study 3, we tested adults in Turkey and the Uni-ted States. We asked if: (a) the high degree of essen-tialization for gender and nationality observedamong children in both countries would be foundin adulthood; (b) the differentiation among cate-gories would be more marked; and (c) the rankorder of categories in terms of the degree of essen-tialization would be the same. We tested studentsat the two universities affiliated with the study.This choice limits any comparison of the child andadult samples, since they did not necessarily comefrom equivalent backgrounds. However, the adultsamples in the two countries were comparable, asdescribed next.

Method

Participants

In Turkey, 117 adults (88 females) and in theUnited States, 106 adults (79 females) participatedin Study 3. In Turkey, participants were students ofpsychology and other courses at a public, English-language, secular university in Istanbul. The univer-sity recruits from a range of socioeconomicbackgrounds, since entrance is mainly dependenton nation-wide, examination-based ranking. Thestudents are more Westernized than the averageadult in Istanbul because they are young adults,fluent in English and studying at a university withan American academic system. In the United States,participants were psychology students at an urban,secular university.

Design and Procedures

We used the same stimuli, questions, and codingsystem as in Studies 1 and 2 but participants werepresented with the stimuli and questions onlinethrough a Qualtrics program. Before testing began,adults read a statement describing the survey as“child-friendly” and explaining that answers wouldbe compared to children’s answers to the samequestions. Participants in Turkey responded inTurkish, and U.S. participants responded inEnglish.

Results

Figure 1c shows the pattern of essentialist think-ing by Turkish and U.S. adults for the five cate-gories (see Table S10 for means and standarderrors). As illustrated, adults essentialized the cate-gories to a similar degree in both countries. Tocompare adults’ beliefs across the two countries, weran a regression model for each social category onadults’ essentialism scores with Country as the solepredictor. Given that five models were run, Bonfer-roni corrections were applied. Country did not pre-dict adults’ essentialism score for any category (seeTable S11).

As shown in Table S10, the rank order of essen-tialist thinking about the categories is quite similaracross the two countries. To statistically test pat-terns of differentiation between the categories, weran mixed-effects, linear regression models onadult’s composite essentialism scores with Categoryas a fixed effect and Participant ID as a randomeffect, in each country. To compare between all cat-egories, we reset the reference level for Categoryeach time, resulting in four models. To account formultiple comparisons, we applied Bonferroni cor-rections (a = .0125). Both in Turkey and the UnitedStates, adults held the strongest essentialist beliefsabout gender, followed by nationality, SES, religion,and sports teams. Turkish adults differentiatedamong all categories, and U.S. adults differentiatedamong all categories except religion and teams(Table S12). Thus, adults’ differentiation among thecategories was similar to that of the oldest childrenin each country. The rank order of essentializationof the categories was similar for the adults in bothcountries, but differed from the rank order for chil-dren in one respect. Children essentialized Religionmore than SES, but adults essentialized SES morethan Religion.

For an analysis of adults’ responses to the indi-vidual questions in the essentialism, see the Sup-porting Information (Figure S5, Table S15, andAdditional Analyses, Part B-III).

Discussion

Just as children in Turkey and the United Statesshowed similar overall patterns of essentialist think-ing for the five social categories, adults in bothcountries also looked strikingly similar. Like theolder children, adults differentiated between almostall categories, although they held weaker essential-ist beliefs about religion than SES, whereas childrenessentialized religion more than SES. The strong

12 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake

essentialist beliefs about gender and nationalityamong adults in both countries further support thehypothesis that some, but not all, social categoriesare essentialized to a high degree because theyappear to reflect important biological differencesbetween people.

General Discussion

The results of the three studies allow us to revisitthe hypotheses outlined in the introduction. Weproposed two possible patterns of development inthe United States and Turkey based on the two the-oretical proposals we described. The cultural salienceaccount focused on the role of culture-specific reali-ties, such as conflict and discrimination, in makingcertain categories salient and triggering an essential-ized conception of those categories. Based on cul-tural differences between the two countries, wepredicted that the categories of gender, nationalityand religion would be more highly essentialized inTurkey than in the United States. These differencesdid not emerge from the analyses. In fact, all cate-gories were essentialized at comparable levels andin the same rank order in both countries for bothchildren and adults.

The cross-national similarity in the overall pat-tern is particularly striking for those categories forwhich, in principle, cultural differences might haveaffected essentialist beliefs. If essentialist thinking ismainly a response to the social salience of the cate-gory through mechanisms such as conflict betweensocial groups, then differences between the UnitedStates and Turkey would be expected for genderand nationality. Indeed, we predicted that strongergender hierarchies and nationalistic values wouldlead to higher essentialization of these categories inTurkey. However, the two countries proved moresimilar than different for both categories. For reli-gion, we predicted that Turkish children in Turkeywould have stronger essentialist beliefs than U.S.children about differences between Muslims andChristians since Turkish children are rarely exposedto non-Muslims and receive religious instruction inschool. However, religion was similarly essential-ized in Turkey and the United States and showed amarked decline by adulthood.

The biological relevance account emphasized thedegree to which categories are conceived as similarto biological categories. Thus, in both cultures, cate-gories that initially appear to have a biological basiswill be essentialized earlier and more strongly, thancategories that do not. The level of essentialist

thinking for particular categories should declinewith age as children come to question their biologi-cal bases. This account allows for cultural influencesbut suggests a greater resistance to change in theinitial biological conception of a given category.The pattern of results across ages and countriesappears to fit this account quite closely.

Both in Turkey and the United States, genderwas the most highly essentialized category amongchildren and adults. The developmental patternwas also similar, even if some differences didemerge. For example, in Turkey, children hadstrong, essentialist beliefs about gender throughoutdevelopment. Arguably, their early tendency toconceive of gender as a biologically relevant cate-gory is reinforced by their continued exposure to apronounced gender hierarchy and the prevalence ofsegregated gender roles (e.g., Fis�ek & Sunar, 2005;Ka�gıtc�ıbas�ı, 1982). In the United States, althoughessentialist beliefs were already strong among theyounger children, there was a developmentalincrease in essentialist thinking about gender. Thisunexpected age change could be due to increasedgender stereotyping later in development, especiallyin the school setting. Nevertheless, in both coun-tries, gender was the most essentialized category,controlling for age, and there were no quantitativedifferences between the countries in the develop-ment of essentialist beliefs about gender (seeTable S9). Thus, the results suggest a universal ten-dency to essentialize gender in terms of biologywith some influence from cultural experiences.

Consistent with the biological relevance account,essentialist thinking about categories with no clearbiological underpinning decreased with age. In bothcountries, the category of sports-teams fan wasessentialized less than gender by children andadults. Presumably, in both countries, children andadults realize that supporting a specific sports teamis a personal choice with no biological basis. In fact,when asked about changing one’s favorite sportsteam, children offering an explanation usually saidthat if a team becomes more “famous” or “wins”more often, one may change one’s preferences.Essentialist beliefs about SES were also low in bothcountries suggesting an awareness that wealth sta-tus can change, even if the direction of change isunclear. Interestingly, essentialist beliefs about reli-gion did not undergo significant changes duringchildhood in either country, but they had declinedconsiderably by the onset of adulthood.

The evidence suggests that some, but not all,social categories are prone to a biologicalor pseudo-biological representation in human

Social Essentialism Across Culture and Age 13

cognition. These categories become prime candi-dates for essentialist beliefs, especially in the earlyyears, but cultural experience can influence specificaspects of essentialist beliefs. Here, the case ofnationality is interesting. There has been little sys-tematic research on children’s essentialist viewsabout nationality (although see Cimpian & Hussak,2017), but children may tune into quasi-biologicalcues, such as language, accent, or other perceptiblemarkers (see Kinzler & Dautel, 2012). Anecdotally,in explaining their answers regarding nationality,children often appealed to the characters being“born that way,” or speaking “different languages.”Gil-White (2002) argued for a biological conceptionof ethnicity, and children’s and even adults’ con-cepts of “nationality” may closely match their con-cepts of “ethnicity,” with both concepts includingsupposedly biological characteristics.

Despite the evidence for the biological relevanceaccount, a plausible alternative explanation focuseson the role of language. Children learn a great dealfrom the verbal testimony of others around them(Harris & Koenig, 2006). In particular, adults’ use ofgeneric language conveys information about anentire category (Gelman, 2004). Generics thus serveas a well-established mechanism for the culturaltransmission of social essentialist beliefs (Rhodes,Leslie, & Tworek, 2012). The cross-cultural similari-ties we observed may be linked to cross-culturalsimilarities in the language used to describe socialcategories. For example, generic language is oftenused to describe gender categories (e.g., “boys playfootball”) and similar usage likely occurs in bothTurkey and the United States. However, languageseems unlikely to be the sole driver of social essen-tialism for the other categories tested. Notice, forexample, that similar language is used to describedifferent nationalities (e.g., “Americans love basket-ball”), religious groups (e.g., “Muslims fast duringRamadan”), SES (e.g., “rich people go to fancyrestaurants”), and sports teams (e.g., “Yankees arelosers”). Arguably children are exposed to genericlanguage describing some categories, such as gen-der, more often than others, and this could lead tovariation in essentialist thinking. However, thisbegs the question of why generic language is usedmore frequently for some categories than others. Amore comprehensive model would emphasize theinterplay between generic language and conceptualrepresentation of social categories. For example,given that information conveyed in generic lan-guage is central to children’s reasoning about bio-logical concepts (Cimpian & Markman, 2009), it ispossible that generic language is used more often to

describe social categories that are represented asbiologically relevant. It would be worth examininghow this tendency extends to reasoning aboutsocial categories in children and adults. Impor-tantly, the biological relevance account does notignore the role of cultural input in leading to varia-tion in the biological perception of social categories,but it emphasizes the role of biological concepts inthe essentialization of social categories, notwith-standing the mechanisms responsible for those bio-logical concepts.

One key limitation of the current study concernsthe specific measure of essentialism we used. Thequestion measure focuses primarily on the natural-kind aspect of essentialist reasoning, which refers tothe tendency to perceive social categories as havingunderlying natural causes. It remains an open ques-tion whether the same cross-culturally similar pat-terns would be observed for other aspects of socialessentialism, such as the extent to which a categoryis represented as inductively powerful, coherent,homogeneous, or meaningful, aspects related to en-tativity. Entativity and natural-kind essentialism donot necessarily correlate in the perception of humancategories (Haslam et al., 2000; Haslam et al., 2002;but see also Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Estrada, 2001).Therefore, the patterns we observed might changeusing a measure of entativity. Another limitation ofour study is possible cultural differences betweenthe two societies that might impact data collection.For example, in comparison to American sampleswho typically express individualistic and indepen-dent views, in societies where conformity is empha-sized as a cultural norm, children’s interactionswith adults may center on harmony and assimila-tion (see Nisbett, 2007). Turkish children may beexposed to such a collectivist orientation, but thisdid not appear to lead to major differences in theresults compared to U.S. children.

Lastly, we consider how the biological relevanceaccount might align with the development of essen-tialist beliefs about race. Children’s essentialistbeliefs about race tend to be lower than for genderand they increase with age (Mandalaywala, Ranger-Murdock, Amodio, & Rhodes, 2018; Rhodes & Gel-man, 2009; Roberts & Gelman, 2016). The biologicalrelevance account is not inconsistent with theseresults. Specifically, we share with other researchersthe intuition that reasoning about categories withbiologically significant markers (e.g., gender andnationality) may be constrained by intuitive biasesgiven the evolutionary significance of these cate-gories (see Cosmides, Tooby, & Kurzban, 2003).Reasoning about race, however, is related to

14 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake

children’s specific experiences with group member-ship, social interactions and attitudes, as well astheir exposure to diversity. These experiences caninclude belonging to a racial minority group (Kin-zler & Dautel, 2012), age-based and racial groupinteractions (Roberts & Gelman, 2016), exposure toout-group members and diverse racial attitudes(Mandalaywala et al., 2018), and rural versus urbancultural experience (Rhodes & Gelman, 2009). Indirectly comparing the development of essentialistbeliefs about race and gender, Rhodes and Gelman(2009) argue that gender is viewed by young chil-dren and adults as a natural category, whereasviews about race interact with age and cultural con-text (see also Diesendruck et al., 2013). These pat-terns underline the sensitivity of concepts aboutrace and the relative imperviousness of conceptsabout gender to cultural differences (Rhodes &Mandalaywala, 2017).

In drawing these distinctions, we underline thetheoretical implications of our model and those thatview essentialism as folk-biological concept that canbe transferred to the social domain under someconditions (see Atran, 1998). The biological rele-vance model does not imply that essentialism is adomain-specific module. By contrast, the domain-specific account implies that when essentialistthinking is triggered for reasoning about nonbiolog-ical categories, various dimensions of essentialistreasoning will cohere. Our dimension-level analysisshows this not to be the case. Moreover, thedomain-specific account does not explain variationin the essentialization of different social categoriesthroughout development. We show that when com-paring a range of social categories, cultural variabil-ity in essentialist beliefs is low for those socialcategories that are conceived as biologically rele-vant and that the same rank order exists in the twocultures we tested. We believe that this is consistentwith domain-general accounts of the developmentof social essentialism as proposed by Gelman(2004), Gelman and Hirschfeld (1999), and Rhodesand Mandalaywala (2017), defining essentialism asa causal-explanatory framework that helps childrenmake sense of their environment. Nevertheless, inusing this framework, children are constrained bytheir basic conceptual biases. Thus, if childrenconceive of a given social category as having a bio-logical underpinning, the causal-explanatory frame-work of essentialism may fit their theory of thatsocial category. In stressing the role of biologicalthinking, the biological relevance account does notignore the role of cultural input. In fact, the modelcan illuminate the impact of culture on the degree

of biological thinking about social categories. Futureresearch should study the mechanisms impactingchildren’s conception of social categories as rela-tively biological as well as the influence of culture.

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Supporting Information

Additional supporting information may be found inthe online version of this article at the publisher’swebsite:

Figure S1. Stimuli Used in Turkey to RepresentEach Category (for Girls)

Figure S2. Stimuli Used in the United States toRepresent Each Category (for Girls)

Figure S3. Turkish Children’s EssentialistResponses With Age in Terms of the IndividualQuestions for Each Category

Figure S4. U.S. Children’s Essentialist ResponsesWith Age in Terms of the Individual Questions forEach Category

Figure S5. Adults’ Essentialist Answers in Termsof Individual Questions in Each Category in Turkey(a) and United States (b)

Table S1. Turkish Children. Means and StandardErrors of Total Essentialism Scores by Age Groupand Each Social Category

Table S2. Turkish Children. Results FromMixed-Effects, Linear Regression Models With Chil-dren’s Age and Category as Predictors for Essential-ist Beliefs

Table S3. Turkish Children. Results From LinearRegression Models With Children’s Age (in Years)as the Predictor for Essentialist Beliefs About EachSocial Category

Table S4. U.S. Children. Means and StandardErrors of Total Essentialism Scores by Age Groupand Social Category

Table S5. U.S. Children. Results From Mixed-Effects, Linear Regression Models With Children’sAge and Category as Predictors for EssentialistBeliefs

Social Essentialism Across Culture and Age 17

Table S6. U.S. Children. Results From LinearRegression Models With Children’s Age (in Years)as the Predictor for Each Social Category

Table S7. Turkish Children’s Responses to theQuestion, “Do You Think A/B Has a Lot of Friends?”Proportion Who Answered “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe”

Table S8. U.S. Children’s Responses to the Ques-tion, “Do You Think A/B Has a Lot of friends?” Pro-portion Who Answered “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe”

Table S9. Comparing Children in Turkey and theUnited States. Results From Linear Regression Modelsfor Each Category

Table S10. Adults in Turkey and the United States.Means and Standard Errors of Total EssentialismScores by Country

Table S11. Comparing Adults in Turkey and theUnited States.

Table S12. Patterns of Differentiation Among theFive Categories in Adults’ Essentialist Beliefs byCountry

Table S13. Means (SD) of Children’s Answers toEach Question by Category (Country and Age Col-lapsed)

Table S14. Means (SD) of Adults’ Answers to EachQuestion by Category (Country Collapsed)

Table. S15. Comparison Between All Levels ofQuestion by Category for Adults in Turkey (a) andthe United States. (b)

Appendix S1. ScriptAppendix S2. Additional Analyses

18 Davoodi, Soley, Harris, and Blake