Abstract
Generic descriptions (e.g., ”girls are emotional”) are argued to play a major role in the development of essentialist reasoning about social categories (Rhodes et al., 2018). However, studies have been conducted dominantly in English-speaking communities and among Western samples. This is a significant limitation given that a number of theories focus on the linguistic form of generic statements and distinguish between linguistic form and content in leading to essentialism. In this study, we plan to extend the research on generics and social essentialism beyond English-speaking, Western samples. We aim to explore how generic statements with different content (biological or cultural) about a novel social category may lead to essentialist beliefs among children and adults in Iran, a Persian-speaking community that is underrepresented in the literature. Using a design similar to Noyes & Keil (2020), we plan to expose 4 to 9-year-old children (N = 104) and adults (N = 104) to generic or specific statements (between subjects) ascribing biological or cultural features to a novel social category. We will measure the degree to which exposure to these statements leads to essentialist reasoning in terms of inheritability and “kindhood”. This work contributes to diversifying the field and critically informs theories of social essentialism.
When do generics lead to social essentialism: developmental evidence from Iran
“Men don’t do household chores.” (مردها کارِ خانه انجام نمی‌دهند). These types of expressions which refer to “kinds” of people, animals, or artifacts are known as generic statements (Carlson & Pelletier, 1995; Shipley, 1993; Gelman and Raman, 2003). Generic statements are common in English (Rhodes et al., 2012), and a growing body of research programs have documented a link between generic language and the tendency to reason about categories as “kinds” (Gelman et al., 2010; Cimpian & Markman, 2011; Rhodes et al., 2012). Despite the prevalence of generic statements across languages, the impact of generics has largely been studied in an exclusively English-speaking context and within Western cultures (but see Segall et al., 2015 for an exception).
The lack of linguistic and cultural variability in this literature is particularly problematic because 1. the research on generic language overwhelmingly conducted with English speakers draws general conclusions about the structure of generics in relation to categorization, without any qualifiers about the role of specific language grammar; this suggests that a link exists between reasoning about categories in terms of “kinds” and generic statements across a range of languages; yet this has not actually been tested. 2. Generic language has been hypothesized as a key linguistic feature that cues children into which social categories are most relevant and important in their specific cultural context. Given this purported function of generics, and the cross-cultural ubiquity of generics, generic language is a plausible factor by which children across the world acquire categories and beliefs about social categories. Yet again, beyond English-speaking children in Western countries, this assumption has rarely been tested.
In the current study, we draw on influential work on the role of generic language in social essentialism among English-speaking participants to design and carry out a replication-plus-extension study with Persian-speaking children and adults living in Iran. Specifically, we plan to replicate Noyes and Keil (2020) on the question of how generic statements with different content (i.e., biological versus cultural information) impact reasoning about social categories as “kinds” and as defined by inheritable features, dimensions of essentialist reasoning about social categories. In addition to implementing the same design and asking the same questions as in Noyes and Keil (2020), we plan to include a third condition in the current study, where category descriptions are provided in “specific” as opposed to generic statements. This will serve as a control condition in our study.
In what follows, we briefly review the literature on generic language in child-directed speech and its role in the development of social essentialism (one important type of social category belief: Gelman, 2003; Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017). We will then describe the value to be gained by extending this literature to research among children and adults in Iran, a non-Western, Persian-speaking sample underrepresented in psychological research. Lastly, we will detail the planned study.