ArticleChild development2021
Does It Matter How We Speak About Social Kinds? A Large, Preregistered, Online Experimental Study of How Language Shapes the Development of Essentialist Beliefs.
Article in Child development, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Generic Language for Social and Animal Kinds: An Examination of the Asymmetry Between Acceptance and Inferences.Cognitive science · 2022Trial
- Gender-inclusive language in midwifery and perinatal services: A guide and argument for justice.Birth (Berkeley, Calif.) · 2025Article
- Girls as objects, boys as humans: Young children tend to be objectified along gender lines.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2025Article
- How cultural input shapes the development of idealized biological prototypes.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2025Article
- Generically partisan: Polarization in political communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The influence of linguistic form and causal explanations on the development of social essentialism.Cognition · 2022Article
- Developmental origins of anti-Black bias in White children in the United States: Exposure to and beliefs about racial inequality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Parents' Political Ideology Predicts How Their Children Punish.Psychological science · 2022Article
- Why do children show racial biases in their resource allocation decisions?Journal of experimental child psychology · 2021Article
- Does It Matter How We Speak About Social Kinds? A Large, Preregistered, Online Experimental Study of How Language Shapes the Development of Essentialist Beliefs.Child development · 2021Article
- Bringing Home Baby Euclid: Testing Infants' Basic Shape Discrimination Online.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- A Tale of Three Platforms: Investigating Preschoolers' Second-Order Inferences Using In-Person, Zoom, and Lookit Methodologies.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Research at a Distance: Replicating Semantic Differentiation Effects Using Remote Data Collection With Children Participants.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Comparing Online Webcam- and Laboratory-Based Eye-Tracking for the Assessment of Infants' Audio-Visual Synchrony Perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children.Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society · 2020Article
- Validation of an open source, remote web-based eye-tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A problematic way to think about social categories is to essentialize them-to treat particular differences between people as marking fundamentally distinct social kinds. From where do these beliefs arise? Language that expresses generic claims about categories elicits some aspects of essentialism, but the scope of these effects remains unclear. This study (N = 204, ages 4.5-8 years, 73% White; recruited predominantly from the United States and the United Kingdom to participate online in 2019) found that generic language increases two critical aspects of essentialist thought: Beliefs that (a) category-related properties arise from intrinsic causal mechanisms and (b) category boundaries are inflexible. These findings have implications for understanding the spread of essentialist beliefs across communities and the development of intergroup behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.