Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes,” “girls hatemath”) is a powerful vehicle for communicating essentialistbeliefs. One way generic language likely communicates thesebeliefs is by leading children to generate kind-basedexplanations about particular properties; e.g., if a child hears“girls hate math,” he may infer that there must be an inherentcausal basis for the generalization, which in turn supportsessentialist beliefs. However, it is also possible that simplyhearing a category described with generics elicits the beliefthat the category is an appropriate kind to generalize about.On this account, even if the generic is negated (“girls don’thate math”), the generic language might nonetheless leadchildren to essentialize the category. The current studysupports the latter possibility, suggesting that even hearingnegated generics (“girls don’t hate math”) may still fostersocial essentialism.