Learning, Concept Acquisition and Psychological Essentialism

Psychological essentialism and stereotype endorsement

Research on implicit person theories shows that people who believe that human attributes are immutable (“entity theorists”) are particularly prone to endorse social stereotypes and to explain them with reference to innate factors. We argue that entity theories belong to a broader set of beliefs that represent diVerences between people in terms of underlying essences. New measures of three essen...

Inter-modal Learning and Object Concept Acquisition

Geometric Concept Acquisition by Deep Reinforcement Learning

Explaining how intelligent systems come to embody knowledge of deductive concepts through inductive learning is a fundamental challenge of both cognitive science and AI. This project address this challenge by exploring how deep reinforcement learning agents, occupying settings similar to early-stage mathematical concept learners come to represent ideas such as rotation and translation. I first ...

Language and Conceptual Development series Psychological essentialism in children

Psychological essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as ‘lion’ or ‘female’, have an underlying reality that cannot be observed directly. Where does this idea come from? This article reviews recent evidence suggesting that psychological essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowle...

Essentialism goes social: belief in social determinism as a component of psychological essentialism.

Individuals tend to explain the characteristics of others with reference to an underlying essence, a tendency that has been termed psychological essentialism. Drawing on current conceptualizations of essentialism as a fundamental mode of social thinking, and on prior studies investigating belief in genetic determinism (BGD) as a component of essentialism, we argue that BGD cannot constitute the...