Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes”) leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to (...) a single individual limited beliefs that the referenced categories could explain what their members would be like while broadening the scope to a superordinate category (Study 2) uniquely limited endorsement of gender norms. Across both studies, correcting generics did not alter beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences, suggesting that additional mechanisms (e.g., causal reasoning about shared features) contribute to the development of full-blown essentialist beliefs. These results help illuminate the mechanisms by which generics lead children to view categories as having rich inductive and causal potential; in particular, they suggest that children interpret generics as signals that speakers in their community view the referenced categories as meaningful kinds that support generalization. The findings also point the way to concrete suggestions for how adults can effectively correct problematic generics (e.g., gender stereotypes) that children may hear in daily life. (shrink)

In this study, we investigated explicit and implicit endorsement of prescriptive age stereotypes. To achieve that, we captured endorsement of a wide range of prescriptive expectations targeting both younger and older people. Younger and older adults participated in the study. We assessed implicit endorsement of prescriptive age stereotypes with the Propositional Evaluation Paradigm and used a direct measure to assess explicit endorsement. In general, we found strong support for age-specificity in both explicit and implicit endorsement of prescriptive age stereotypes: Sentences (...) ascribing expectations for young/old to the respective age group were endorsed much more strongly than sentences in which expectations for young/old were ascribed to the other age group. Age group differences in the endorsement of prescriptive age stereotypes were found. Compared to younger participants, older participants showed stronger endorsement for prescriptive beliefs targeting both younger and older targets. Explicit and implicit endorsement of prescriptive age stereotypes did not correlate with one another, thus revealing they might assess independent belief systems with different predictive potential. (shrink)