Design and Procedure
The procedure of our study is largely adopted from Noyes and Keil (2020)
with a few small changes. We plan to use a 2 (properties/content:
cultural vs. biological) by 2 (language form: generic vs. specific),
fully-crossed, between-subject design. In addition to the two generic
statement conditions from Noyes & Keil (2020), we will also include
specific language conditions for each property/content condition. In the
absence of previous research on the role of generics in the development
of essentialist beliefs in Iran, it is important to explore how generics
as a linguistic form and independent of their content may elicit
essentialist beliefs in this context. These additional specific
conditions enable us to determine a baseline for essentialist beliefs
about novel social categories through development, and help us rule out
the role of repetition11In Noyes and Keil (2020), the control
and experimental trials differ with respect to how many times children
have heard the relevant scenarios (they only hear the control trial
once while they hear the experimental trial 16 times); in our design,
we eliminate this difference between the control and experimental
conditions..
All children will be tested in person and in Persian. At the start of
the study, parents and children (and adult participants) will provide
informed consent to participate. In a warm-up phase, they will first be
introduced to and familiarized with a novel social category, the
Foolies, and the island they live on. Then, in the teaching phase, they
will be presented with one story book consisting of 16 sentences about
the Foolies, based on the condition they were assigned to. In the
specific conditions, the Foolies will be described in specific language
and in the generic conditions, “Foolies” will be described in generic
language (see stimuli below for more details). Two memory check
questions will be included between the sentences in the teaching phase.
For example, in the biological condition, participants hear the
statement “Foolies have super strong finger nails.” and after a couple
of more statements, they are asked “Do Foolies have weak fingernails,
or super strong finger nails?”
For adults, the design will be identical, but they will be tested
online. We will use Porsline, an Iranian online survey service
(https://porsline.ir) to program the study for adults.