What Do Social Categories Indicate to Children?

Our social world is divided into numerous categories and groups: men and women, American and Guatemalan, Christian and atheist, the rich and the poor, White and Black, children and adults. Structural features of our societies, such as the imbalance of power, social hierarchies, and systemic discrimination reinforce the division of the social world into distinct categories.

Children grow up learning about these divisions in different ways. For example, children are exposed to language that describes members of different social groups as a coherent unit (e.g., “girls are pretty”), or they are simply exposed to, and observe, the unequal mapping of power, resources, and opportunities to members of distinct social categories.

What do these observations indicate to children? Do they come to believe that social categories, like gender or nationality, mark some meaningful, deep, internal, socially or biologically relevant differences between people? In fact, Marjorie Rhodes, from New York University, and her colleagues have shown that cultural input, such as the use of generic language (“girls are pretty”) in describing a novel social category leads 4-year-old children to believe that the social category marks fundamentally different kinds of people, a tendency called “essentialism” (Rhodes, Leslie, & Tworek, 2012).

Thus, children essentialize social categories. But to what extent do they essentialize different social categories which are familiar to them? And how does the strength of their social essentialist bias differ based on their cultural environment? Are there, for example, some social categories that are especially susceptible to essentialist reasoning independent of cultural input?

In a research study conducted with my colleagues, we investigated some of these questions. Specifically, we presented both children (5 to 10 years old) and adults from two different countries, the U.S. and Turkey, with characters who represented members of different groups of a social category. For example, children and adults saw two characters, with one introduced as a Muslim and the other introduced as a Christian. This primed the social category of religious affiliation for participants. In addition to this category, we also presented participants with characters from different groups of the categories of gender (e.g., boy, girl), nationality (e.g., American, British), socioeconomic status (e.g., rich, poor), and sports-team affiliation (e.g., Red Sox, Yankees).

After presenting participants with each pair (e.g., Christian and Muslim), we asked them five questions, which measured how much participants believed these characters are different kinds of humans. We asked whether the characters were born into their group (“was this one born a Christian and this one born a Muslim?”), whether their brains are different (“is this one’s brain different from this one?”), whether their group membership can be established by investigating their blood (“can scientist in the future tell that this one is a Christian and this one a Muslim by looking at their blood under a microscope?), whether they can change their group (“can this one become a Muslim and this one become a Christian if they wanted to?”), and whether their group membership has anything to do with their surroundings (“why is this one a Christian and this one a Muslim? Is it because of things people around them do?”).

We gave participants a score of 1 for every response that indicated an essentialist pattern of reasoning and a score of 0 for every response that did not indicate an essentialist pattern. We then added up the scores for each participant, such that each participant received an essentialism score ranging from 0 to 5.

Previous research with children in Israel and the U.S. had shown that children believe social category membership is rigid. For example, kindergarteners generally thought that an individual who looks like a man cannot be categorized as a woman. However, the rigidity of this bias varied based on how much a certain social category was culturally relevant and salient in children’s respective cultures. For example, for children in Israel, the social category that yielded the most rigid responses in children about whether people can be categorized as belonging to the other group was ethnicity. Israeli children strongly believed that a person looking like an Arab cannot be categorized as Jewish and vice versa (Diesendruck et al., 2013).

In our research, we extended this work by measuring how much children and adults think social categories are indicative of fundamental differences between people and how that varies (or is stable) between the two cultures where we tested.

As seen in the figure, we found that compared to the other categories, the two categories of gender and nationality were more strongly perceived as indicative of fundamental differences between people by children and adults in both countries (Davoodi, Soley, Harris, & Blake, 2019).

Gender Essential Reads

Why Women Have Less Power in the Workplace

What Is “Tonic” Masculinity and Why It Matters

Total essentialism scores for each social category. SES = socioeconomic status.

Source: Telli Davoodi

How do we interpret these findings? Specifically, going back to the question about the role of culture, is there a similarity in the way these two cultures convey information about gender and nationality, which leads to strong essentialist beliefs about these categories among children and adults? Or, is there something about the way the categories of gender and nationality are perceived, independent of cultural input, that make these categories especially prone to essentialist reasoning?

The second possibility seems more plausible, given that there are important differences in the way gender norms and gender roles are viewed in the two cultures (we review some of these differences in the paper). Presumably, children and adults are exposed to somewhat different information and language about gender in these two countries, yet these differences do not seem to influence the patterns of essentialist reasoning about gender. Therefore, we conclude that something about the way the category of gender (and perhaps nationality) is generally perceived makes it a prime candidate for essentialist reasoning.

Importantly, the answer may lie in a biological understanding of some social categories. That is, some social categories, like gender, might be intuitively linked to biological underpinning in the way people reason about them, leading to the idea that the category marks fundamental differences between people.

Such reasoning may, in fact, be reinforced by social structures and other kinds of social input, but it may still be present even in the absence of substantial social input. This is, importantly, something that can be tested and investigated in future research.

And if the belief that some social categories are biologically relevant leads to essentialist reasoning, then other important questions are: Why are some social categories perceived as biologically relevant? And who are the individuals, communities, or cultures who do not perceive these social categories as biologically relevant?

These are critical questions to think about given documented links between social essentialism and discrimination, prejudice, and dehumanization. Understanding the cognitive processes that lead to social essentialism over-development can have important implications for research on the origins of discrimination.

More importantly, the social essentialist bias may play a key role in "naturalizing" social inequality, systemic discrimination, and unequal mapping of power to social groups. That is, a possible pattern of psychological reasoning about social inequality, for example, could start with an essentialist bias about socioeconomic status (that the rich and the poor are fundamentally different kinds of people) and easily end with the conclusion that social inequalities reflect natural differences between people, rather than problematic social circumstances that can be changed. Thus, understanding the origins of social essentialism can motivate critical thinking about our social circumstances.