The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought

By Susan A. Gelman. 2003

276 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Conceptual Change and Evolutionary Biology: A Developmental Analysis (2008, background): “Furthermore, consistent with their robust essentialism (Gelman, 2003), 5- to 7-year-olds responded “No” when asked the closed-ended question: Could one species have been the descendent of a completely different kind of animal (see also Samarapungavan & Weirs, 1997).”
The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior (2009, background): “evolved range of the human mind includes such phenomena as “naive dualism” (Bering 2006), “teleological thought” (Kelemen and DiYanni 2005), “psychological essentialism” (Gelman 2003), a “theory of mind”, an “agency detection device””
Children’s Interpretation of Facial Expressions: The Long Path from Valence-Based to Specific Discrete Categories (2013, result): “These findings are consonant with research on the role of language in concept acquisition more generally (Gelman, 2003; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003), in the role of language in emotion understanding in particular (Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, & Russell, 2006; Lindquist & Gendron, 2013), and…”
Weird people, yes, but also weird experiments (2010, unknown): “Psychological essentialism also extends to the understanding of social groups, which may be found in Americans (Gelman, 2003), rural Ukranians (Kanovsky, 2007), Vezo (Astuti, 2001), Mapuche farmers (Chile), Iraqi Chaldean immigrants in Detroit (Henrich & Henrich, 2007), and Mongolian herdsmen (Gil‐ ”
The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience (2017, background): “The lack of specificity regarding fine-grained definitions of the self in the context of STEs may indicate that a more generalized, folk psychological sense of self is involved (Bloom, 2010; Gelman, 2003; Gillihan & Farah, 2005; Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014).”
The vernacular concept of innateness (2009, unknown): “…that membership in a biological kind is associated with a particular causal essence or inner nature – that is, some property or set of properties that define membership in a kind and cause members of the kind to possess kind-typical properties (Medin and Ortony, 1989; Atran, 1990; Gelman, 2003).”
Enhancing Cultural Intelligence: The Roles of Implicit Culture Beliefs and Adjustment (2017, unknown): “It refers to the idea that individuals can believe that a social category possesses some underlying essences without knowing or understanding what the essences are exactly (Gelman, 2003). differences are there to stay.”
Attitudes Towards Science (2018, background): “5 People intuitively perceive the natural world as emerging from invisible and immutable essences, which carve the world into homogenous and discrete categories (Gelman, 2003).”
Where science starts: spontaneous experiments in preschoolers' exploratory play. (2011, unknown): “…everyday knowledge has the structural, functional, and dynamic properties of scientific theories, has been among the most influential accounts of cognitive development in recent decades (Carey, 1985, 2000; Gelman, 2003; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Gopnik & Schulz, 2007; Keil, 1989; Wellman, 1990).”
The scope of formal explanation (2017, background): “…of research has documented the early emergence and importance of a causal mode of explanation (e.g., Baillargeon, 2002; Carey, 1985; Gelman, 1990, Gelman 2003; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Keil, 1989), which, in Aristotelian terms, draws upon a combination of the material and efficient modes of…”
Functional explanation and the function of explanation. (2006, result): “Gelman et al., 1994; Gelman, 2003; Medin & Atran, in press), the data support the claim that essentialism plays a role in the representation of “living things”, but do not speak to the role of teleology.”
GENERICS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND (2007, background): “Generics appear in children’s speech very early in development, significantly before explicit quantifiers do (Gelman 2003; Roeper, Strauss, and Pearson 2006).”
Culture and Cognition (2019, unknown): “Furthermore, in a range of diverse cultures, membership in generic species is associated with " psychological essentialism " (Medin & Ortony, 1989; Gelman, 2003; Medin & Atran, 2004): people believe that membership in a biological kind is associated with the possession of a causal essence—that is,…”
Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms and the theory theory (2012, unknown): “Similarly, others have traced successive phases in children’s understanding of intuitive biology (Gelman, 2003; Inagaki & Hatano, 2002).”