Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Generic language (e.g., “Women are nurturing”; “Women donot like math”) is prominent in child-directed speech, and hasbeen shown to promote essentialist beliefs about the relevantkind, supporting stereotyping and prejudice. Here weinvestigate a theoretically-motivated intervention to break thelink between generics and essentialist assumptions. In a studywith 223 3-8-year-old children who learned about novel socialgroups from generic language, we demonstrate that a structuralconstrual of generics (attributing the category-propertyassociation to stable external constraints) mitigates essentialistassumptions about social categories. We discuss practicalapplications for reducing stereotype endorsement, andtheoretical implications regarding the meaning of genericlanguage and the development of social kind representations.