Essentialism and Folkbiology: evidence from Brazil

By Paulo Sousa, Scott Atran, Douglas L. Medin. 2002

105 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e7dbd3a40b79fa29d78134735c54c1e2025c242

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Steven J. Heine
2. Peter Carruthers
3. Susan A. Gelman
4. Ilan Dar-Nimrod
5. Paul E. Griffiths
6. Lance J. Rips
7. Edward E. Smith
8. Douglas L. Medin

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Susan A. Gelman
2. Edouard Machery
3. Ilan Dar-Nimrod
4. Peter Carruthers
5. Lance J. Rips
6. Paul E. Griffiths
7. Douglas L. Medin
8. Stephen Laurence

In Social Psychology

1. Ilan Dar-Nimrod
2. Peter Carruthers
3. Susan A. Gelman
4. Paul E. Griffiths
5. Douglas L. Medin
6. Stephen Laurence
7. Edouard Machery
8. Stephen Stich

Citations in the corpus

• Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA (2011, background): “The vast majority of this research has been conducted in Western cultural contexts, and although evidence for psychological essentialism has been found across many diverse cultural groups (e.g., Gil-White, 2001; Sousa et al., 2002), there is also evidence that some correlates of psychological essent”
• The vernacular concept of innateness (2009, background): “For example, when asked to imagine a raccoon that has been surgically modified to look and smell like a skunk, adults maintain that the animal is still a raccoon (Keil, 1989; see also Rips, 1989; Atran et al., 2001 with Yukatek adults; Sousa, Atran, and Medin, 2002 with Brazilian adults).”
• Weird people, yes, but also weird experiments (2010, unknown): “…children in Madagascar (Astuti, Solomon, & Carey, 2004), children from impoverished  neighborhoods in Brazil (Sousa, Atran, & Medin, 2002), Menominee in Wisconsin …”
• The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents (2005, background): “…of innate species potential, or underlying essence, as an inferential framework for understanding the affiliation of an organism to a biological species, and for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms in the face of uncertainty (Atran et al., 2001; Sousa et al., 2002).”
• Concepts and categories: Memory, meaning, and metaphysics (2012, background): “…believe (like adults) that the identity of animals and plants follows that of their progenitors, regardless of the environment in which the progeny matures (e.g., progeny of cows raised with pigs, acorns planted with apple trees) (Atran et al., 2001; Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Sousa et al., 2002).”
• Learning from others: children's construction of concepts. (2009, background): “…adults from widely different environments show essentialist effects, including children in impoverished neighborhoods in Brazil (Diesendruck 2001, Sousa et al. 2002), Torguud adults in Western Mongolia (Gil-White 2001), Vezo children in Madagascar (Astuti et al. 2004), Yucatec Mayan children in…”