Department of Philosophy, City College of New York, New York, NY, United States; Program in Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, United States.
Program in Cognitive Science & Department of Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
Adv Child Dev Behav. 2020;59:133-164. doi: 10.1016/bs.acdb.2020.05.005. Epub 2020 Jun 10.
A large body of existing research suggests that people think very differently about categories that are seen as kinds (e.g., women) and categories that are not seen as kinds (e.g., people hanging out in the park right now). Drawing on work in linguistics, we suggest that people represent these two sorts of categories using fundamentally different representational formats. Categories that are not seen as kinds are simply represented as collections of individuals. By contrast, when it comes to kinds, people have two distinct representations: a representation of a collection of individual people and a representation of the kind itself. The distinction between these two representational formats helps to shed light on otherwise puzzling findings about stereotyping and essentialism. Stereotyping appears to involve a representation of a collection of people, while essentialism involves a representation of a kind itself.
大量现有研究表明，人们对被视为“种类”（例如女性）的类别和不被视为“种类”（例如现在在公园里闲逛的人）的类别有非常不同的看法。借鉴语言学领域的研究成果，我们认为人们使用根本不同的表现形式来表示这两种类别。不被视为种类的类别仅被表示为个体的集合。相比之下，对于种类，人们有两种截然不同的表示形式：对个体人群的集合的表示和对种类本身的表示。这两种表示形式之间的区别有助于阐明有关刻板印象和本质主义的令人费解的发现。刻板印象似乎涉及对人群的集合的表示，而本质主义则涉及对种类本身的表示。
