A Developmental Examination of the Conceptual Structure of Animal, Artifact, and Human Social Categories. and Human Social Categories.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the ontological status that people attribute to categories varies by domain, age, and cultural context. The first four studies examined whether categories of animals, artifacts, and people are represented as objectively-defined natural kinds, or alternately, as subjective conventionalized groupings. Participants included children (ages 5, 7, 10, and 17) drawn from two cultural contexts. Results demonstrated that abstract domain-specific ontological beliefs emerge early in development; in each age-group, children represented animal categories as natural kinds, but artifact categories as more conventionalized. For human social categories, beliefs about naturalness and conventionality were predicted by interactions between the type of category (i.e., gender vs. race), cultural context, and age. Younger children, in both communities, viewed gender as a natural kind, but race categories as more conventionalized. The concepts of older children were found to vary by cultural context. Older children from an ethnically-homogeneous and socially-conservative environment viewed both types of social categories as natural kinds, whereas children from a more diverse environment viewed social categorization as flexible and subjective. Control conditions confirmed that domain effects in beliefs about category naturalness could not be attributed to perceptual features of the stimuli, category knowledge, category salience, or linguistic properties of the task. The fifth study extended these findings to younger children. This work documented that three- and four- year-olds also conceptualize animal species and gender categories as natural kinds, but artifact and race categories as more subjective and flexible. The sixth study documented that the effects of age and cultural context on representations of social categories also extend to children’s beliefs about how social categories influence individual behavior. Overall, results from this dissertation suggest that abstract beliefs about ontology are incorporated into children’s categories from at least the age of three, as well as that the development of social categorization involves complex interactions between intuitive biases and cultural input. Implications for the origins of social categories and theories of conceptual development are discussed.