Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as “dog,” “man,” or “gold,” have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Es-sentialist accounts have been offered, in one form or another, for thousands of years, extending back at least to Aristotle and Plato. Where does this idea come from? I address this question from a psychological perspective and argue that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning language, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. I suggest that chil dren have an early, powerful tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. Parents do not explicitly teach children to essentialize; instead, during the preschool years, children spontaneously construct concepts and beliefs that re flect an essentialist bias. I explore the broader implications of this perspective for human concepts, children's thinking, and the relation between human concepts and the biological world.
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Gelman, S.A. (2009). Essentialist Reasoning about the Biological World. In: Berthoz, A., Christen, Y. (eds) Neurobiology of “Umwelt”. Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85897-3_2
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