9319796 Hirschfeld This research investigates two basic questions in cognition and social concept formation: (1) What principles do young children use to organize knowledge of the social world, and (2) What shapes young children's social stereotypes? Very young children show a spontaneous curiosity about the social world, and appear to reason about it more deeply than previous researchers suggest. They also develop enduring prejudices about members of some social groups. While some children utilize a social reasoning strategy that focuses on behavioral regularities among people, others emphasize nonobvious and 'essentialist' commonalities in a manner that parallels children's expectations about natural kinds. This research examines an important but unexplored issue: how young children enlist theory-like appreciation of the natural world to extend their understanding of the social world. The research examines whether levels of prejudice vary as a function of how extensively children's expectations about social differences are shaped by natural kind reasoning and the role played by natural kind categories in helping children go beyond similarities in appearance in their social understanding. Race and racism are linked to almost every major social problem facing American society. They are implicated in issues ranging from the reproduction of poverty, to underachievement in schools, to differential rates of illness. Most previous accounts see the child playing a passive role in learning prejudice; children acquire racism by virtue of encountering racist messages. This research challenges this assumed learning process, investigating whether children play a more active role in constructing the knowledge they acquire. As such, it likens the learning of prejudice more to language learning than to algebra learning. Like language, prejudice may be easy to learn and difficult to forget. By increasing our understanding of the nature of prejudice and th e psychological processes underlying it, the present research will place us in a better position to reduce it. ***
