Essentialist beliefs about categories (e.g., intuitions that categories like “girl” or “tiger” reflect real natural structure in the world) emerge early in development across diverse cultural contexts, but the processes by which they develop have rarely been examined. We tested if the basic conceptual and explanatory biases that children rely on to build intuitive theories of the world contribute to the emergence of essentialism across early childhood. Consistent with this possibility, children who deferred to experts regarding category labels, endorsed single and intrinsic causes for object functions, and generated over-hypotheses about structure based on limited evidence developed more essentialist beliefs across childhood (with some variation across domains of thought). Together, these data reveal that the development of essentialist beliefs is shaped by basic conceptual biases that underlie how children construct intuitive theories about the world.

Students enter educational settings with complex and well-established intuitive conceptual understandings of theworld, which have important educational consequences. In biology, intuitive thinking can be characterized in terms of cogni-tive construals (anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, Coley & Tanner, 2015). We examined relations betweenintuitive thinking and biological misconceptions, and how formal biology education might influence such relations. 137 bi-ology and non-science majors completed measures of anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, and indicatedagreement/disagreement with common misconceptions and explained their responses. Teleological thinking (but not anthro-pocentric or essentialist thinking) predicted teleological misconceptions. Anthropocentric and teleological thinking (but notessentialist thinking) predicted anthropocentric misconceptions. Agreement with essentialist misconceptions was unrelated tointuitive thinking. Similar patterns for non-majors and majors suggests formal biology education may have little influence onrelations between intuitive reasoning and misconceptions. These findings demonstrate a clear impact of intuitive thinking onlearning biology at the university level.