Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Dec;212:105231. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105231. Epub 2021 Aug 3.
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.
儿童普遍存在一种偏见，即他们在世界上观察到的事物反映了事物应该存在的方式。当前的研究通过测试这种偏见是否反映了一种关于人类社会行为的特殊推理形式，或者反映了类别表示的更一般特征，来检验这种偏见的本质。年龄在 4 至 9 岁的儿童和成年人（N=747）评估了新的生物和人类社会种类成员之间的不一致实例。儿童对动物和人类类别都持有规范性期望；在这两种情况下，他们都说一个类别成员从事类别异常行为是错误的。这些关于类别的规范性判断取决于人们认为所描述的个体例子在多大程度上代表了连贯的类别。因此，早期的规范性判断似乎依赖于一般概念偏见和关于类别结构的特定领域信念之间的相互作用。
