Investigating The Relationship Between Age and Essentialist Beliefs

Abstract

Children tend to reason about nurture and nature differently and rely on one or the other when describing people’s differences. The Adoption Project focuses on the reasoning of children who are either donor-conceived/adopted or traditionally conceived and how they differ in essentialist reasoning. In this project, 85 children between the ages of 4-8 years were recruited through an ad posted on Facebook to participate in The Families Game study. We assessed their levels of essentialism across five different trials where they had to decide whether a child would grow up to be more similar to their birth parents or adopted parents. I hypothesized that as they become older, children would be more essentialist when deciding whether a child will grow up to be like their birth or adopted parent. However, results showed there was no significant relationship between age and children’s essentialism scores. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed.