Categories convey prescriptive information across domains and development

Young children display a pervasive bias to assume that what they observe in the world reflects how things are supposed to be. The present studies examined the nature of this bias, by testing whether it reflects a particular form of social reasoning or a more general feature of category representations. Children ages 4-9 and adults (N = 747) evaluated instances of nonconformity among members of novel biological and social kinds. Children held prescriptive expectations for both animal and social 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.

幼童普遍存在一种假设，即他们观察到的世界反映的是事物的本真面貌。本研究通过检验这种假设是否反映了一种特定的社会推理形式或类别表征的更一般特征，探讨了该偏见的本质。4至9岁的儿童和成人（N = 747）对新颖生物和社会类别成员的非典型行为实例进行了评估。在动物和社会类别中，儿童都持有规范性预期——在两种情况下，他们都认为类别成员从事类别不典型行为是不恰当的。这些关于类别的规范性判断取决于人们认为图中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与类别结构特定信念之间的相互作用。