Stimuli
The stimuli and the measurements will be adapted directly from Noyes and Keil (2020). As an exception, the novel category will be named ”Foolies” instead of ”Vawnsie”, since the word “Fooly” is more structurally close to Persian nouns. The novel characters, Foolies, will represent a diverse range of unfamiliar features and the category will include members of difference genders with markers of different ethnicities and religious traditions. We will design and use stimuli that are culturally appropriate. The teaching phase differs across the four experimental conditions. For each condition, 16 generic or specific sentences (randomized between participants) are presented in a storybook. Each sentence describes a biological (e.g., “Foolies can hold their breath for a long time”) or a cultural feature (“Foolies wear special crowns in the summer”) varying between conditions. In addition to these two conditions, we also plan to include “specific” language conditions where the same biological or cultural descriptions will be provided using specific language (“this Fooly can hold its breath for a long time”/ “this Fooly wears special crowns in the summer”).
After children (and adults) view the storybook, they answer questions measuring different aspects of essentialist reasoning11We believe that both intrinsic causal mechanisms and heritability questions measure two components of essentialism (see also Benitez et.al, 2022). In contrast, Noyes and Keil (2020) considered the explanatory questions as the measurement of kindhood, not essentialism., one measure probing the assumed causal mechanism for category description, and another measuring reasoning about heritability of characteristic. The order of questions within each measurement is randomized across participants. The questions and measures are provided below in more details: