28 January -  Gail Gottfried UCLA Psychology Studying Psychological Essentialism
It Depends on What the Definition of 'Inside' Is     A hot trend in developmental cognitive research is to investigate the theory-based nature of conceptual categories, especially natural kind categories.  In particular, the rich inductive potential of natural kinds suggests that individuals believe that -- or at least behave as if -- category membership confers important, immutable properties.  In other words, people seem to assume that category members have an underlying nature, or category "essence," that evokes certain category-specific external features and behaviors.  Termed "psychological essentialism," this assumption appears early in development and may govern categorization as well as theory change.  Investigations of essentialism in children, however, seem to have at times degenerated into extensive discussions of children's knowledge of "insides," or the causal properties of concrete, internal (biological) parts.  In this talk, I present evidence from a series of studies to suggest that, while preschool children may know quite a bit about "insides," they do not conflate "insides" with "essence."  As researchers studying causal reasoning and natural kind concepts, neither should we.