Children's differential weighting of cues to social categories

• We investigated 5-year-olds’ assignment of social category membership.
• Assignment of essentialized social categories was determined by similarity, not labels.
• Internal property information overtook similarity in assignment of all categories.
• Some social categories are construed as natural kinds.

Two studies investigated the weights of physical similarity, labels, and internal properties in 5-year-olds’ (n = 64) categorization and inferences regarding three social categories: gender, race, and shirt-color. Participants saw exemplars of varying degrees of similarity to target categories and were asked to categorize the exemplars and draw inferences about them. Varied across studies was the kind of information pitted against visual similarity – labels (Study 1) or internal information (Study 2). Labels had the weakest effect on children's categorization of the most essentialized category – gender. (Essentialism was assessed independently.) Internal property information dominated physical similarity in determining children's categorization of all three categories. We conclude that essentialized social categories are defined as natural kinds, wherein appearances are indicative of intrinsic essences, and thus information about intrinsic properties – but not labels – can lead children to overlook physical dissimilarity.