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: