Within a cognitive perspective on social essentialism, a number of potential features of our conceptual systems-and how they bias people's interpretation of aspects of social input-were proposed to account for why social essentialism emerges. The universality and precociousness of social essentialism guided scholars in their search for the possible origins of this kind of belief. In fact, there is evidence that all or some of the above symptoms of essentialism are held also by young children in a variety of cultures and in regard to a variety of social groups: social class in Chile ( del Río & Strasser, 2011), race in the United States ( Diesendruck, Goldfein-Elbaz, Rhodes, Gelman, & Neumark, 2013 Pauker, Williams, & Steele, 2016), ethnicity in Madagascar ( Astuti, Solomon, Carey, Ingold, & Miller, 2004) and Israel ( Diesendruck, 2013), gender in the United States ( Taylor, 1996), language in the United States ( Kinzler & Dautel, 2012), and religious groups in Ireland ( Smyth, Feeney, Eidson, & Coley, 2017) and the United States ( Chalik, Leslie, & Rhodes, 2017) (see chapter “Contextualizing the development of social essentialism” by Pauker et al. By now, there is ample evidence that all or some of the above symptoms of essentialism are held by adults in a variety of cultures, in regard to a variety of social groups: caste in India ( Mahalingam, 2003), race in the United States ( Hirschfeld, 1996), and ethnicity in Mongolia ( Gil-White, 2001), to name just a few. Social essentialism is all that when applied to social groups ( Hirschfeld, 1996 Rothbart & Taylor, 1992). Gil Diesendruck, in Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 2020 2 Social essentialism: A cognitive perspectiveĮssentialism is the belief that categories capture objective and internally homogeneous partitions of the natural world, and that consequently, category membership is inherited, causally explanatory, inductively rich, and permanent ( Gelman, 2003 Medin & Ortony, 1989).

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