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

年幼的孩子表现出普遍的偏见，认为他们在世界上观察到的事物反映了事物的本来面目。目前的研究通过测试它是否反映了关于人类社会行为的特定推理形式或类别表征的更普遍特征来检验这种偏见的性质。4至9岁的儿童和成人（N = 747) 评估了新的生物和人类社会类型成员之间不一致的情况。儿童对动物和人类类别都有规定性期望；在这两种情况下，他们都表示类别成员从事类别非典型行为是错误的。这些关于类别的规范性判断取决于人们在多大程度上将图片中的个体示例视为连贯类别的代表。因此，早期的规范性判断似乎依赖于一般概念偏见和关于类别结构的特定领域信念之间的相互作用。