Categories convey prescriptive information across domains and development

Abstract

Young children display a pervasive bias to assume that what they observe in the world reflects how things are supposed to be. The current studies examined the nature of this bias by testing whether it reflects a particular form of reasoning about human social behaviors or a more general feature of category representations. Children aged 4 to 9 years and adults (N = 747) evaluated instances of nonconformity among members of novel biological and human social kinds. Children held prescriptive expectations for both animal and human categories; in both cases, they said it was wrong for a category member to engage in category-atypical behavior. These prescriptive judgments about categories depended on the extent to which people saw the pictured individual examples as representative of coherent categories. Thus, early prescriptive judgments appear to rely on the interplay between general conceptual biases and domain-specific beliefs about category structure.

Keywords: Biological reasoning; Categories; Conceptual development; Normativity; Prescriptive judgments; Social cognition.

Figure 1

Sample trial materials by condition, Study 1. Participants were randomly assigned to see either animals or people, presented either in groups or as individuals. Pictured examples are from nonconforming trials.

Figure 2

Probability of “not OK” responses by age, domain, and scope; nonconforming trials only, in Study 1. Children are included with age as a continuous variable, with shaded areas showing Wald 95% Confidence Intervals, and small lines show the proportion of “not OK” responses for individual participants. The solid lines show the People conditions and the dotted lines show the Animal conditions. Adults are included with age as a categorical variable, large shapes show condition means and error bars show Wald 95% Confidence Intervals. Higher values represent more “not OK” responses.

Figure 3

Sample trial materials by condition, Study 2. Participants were randomly assigned to hear about either animals or people, presented either in groups or as individuals, hiding behind different colored doors. They first saw a collage of images from the assigned domain. The remainder of the images they saw throughout the study were identical across domains. Pictured examples are from nonconforming trials.

Figure 4

Probability of “not OK” responses by age group, domain, and scope; nonconforming trials only, in Study 2. Higher values represent more “not OK” responses. Large shapes represent cell means with Wald 95% Confidence Intervals, small lines show the proportion of “not OK” responses for individual participants.