People express essentialist beliefs about social categories from an early age, but essentialist beliefs about specific social categories vary over development and in different contexts. Adapting two paradigms used with Western samples to measure social essentialism, we examined the development of essentialist beliefs about seven social categories (gender, race, nationality, religion, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and team fan bases) among 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 88) and adults (N = 273) in Iran, a population that is underrepresented in psychology research. Focusing on natural-kind reasoning, we investigated the relative contribution of biological perception of social categories as well as cultural and motivational factors in the development of essentialist beliefs about these categories. Our findings suggest that biological perception of social categories plays a key role and that cultural and motivational factors become more relevant in essentialist reasoning about social categories that are not perceived as biologically marked. The developmental patterns of essentialist reasoning in our study also closely parallel those found in other cultures, namely the United States and Turkey, further suggesting the primary role of biological perception of social categories in natural-kind reasoning about the social world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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伊朗社会本质主义推理的发展：对生物感知、文化输入和激励因素的洞察。


人们从小就表达了对社会类别的本质主义信念，但关于特定社会类别的本质主义信念随着发展和不同的背景而变化。采用与西方样本一起使用的两种范式来衡量社会本质主义，我们检查了伊朗 5 至 10 岁儿童 （N = 88） 和成人 （N = 273） 中关于七种社会类别（性别、种族、国籍、宗教、社会经济地位、民族和球队粉丝群）的本质主义信念的发展，伊朗这个人群在心理学研究中代表性不足。以自然推理为重点，我们调查了生物对社会类别的感知以及文化和动机因素在关于这些类别的本质主义信念发展中的相对贡献。我们的研究结果表明，对社会类别的生物感知起着关键作用，并且文化和动机因素在对未被视为生物标记的社会类别的本质主义推理中变得更加相关。我们研究中本质主义推理的发展模式也与其他文化（即美国和土耳其）中的发展模式非常相似，进一步表明了社会类别的生物感知在关于社会世界的自然推理中的主要作用。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。