Essentialism is the intuition that category membership relies on an invisible essence. Essentialist thinking about social categories is most evident in young children, while comparable methods do not reveal essentialist thinking about social groups in adult participants. However, previous work has found that essentialist thinking about gender was…

To investigate whether adolescents approve of disobedience or lying in response to rules that restrict behavior based on gender, 89 younger (M[subscript age] = 11.74) and older (M[subscript age] = 16.67) adolescents and emerging adults (M[subscript age] = 19.97) judged vignettes wherein a child prefers an activity, but the child's parents indicate…

In everyday life, we are often faced with the problem of judging who owns an object. The current experiments show that children and adults base ownership judgments on group stereotypes, which relate kinds of people to kinds of objects. Moreover, the experiments show that reliance on stereotypes can override another means by which people make…

We examined young adults' essentialist reasoning about gender categories. Previous developmental results suggest that until age 9 or 10, children show marked essentialist reasoning about gender, but this disappears by early adulthood. In contrast, results from social cognition suggest that essentialist thinking about social categories persists…