There is considerable variability in the social categories that children essentialize and the types of expectations children form about these categories, suggesting children's essentialist beliefs are shaped by environmental input. Prior studies have shown that exposure to generic statements about a social category promotes essentialist beliefs in 4.5- to 8-year-old children. However, by this age children form essentialist beliefs quite robustly, and thus it is unclear whether generic statements impact children's expectations about social categories at younger ages when essentialist beliefs first begin to emerge. Moreover, in prior studies the generic statements were delivered by an experimenter and carefully controlled, and thus it is unclear whether these statements would have the same impact if they occurred in a somewhat less constrained setting, such as parents reading a picture book to their child. The current study addressed these open questions by investigating whether generic statements delivered during a picture-book interaction with their parents influenced 3-year-olds' expectations about members of a novel social category. Our results showed that children who heard generic statements during the picture-book interaction used social-group membership to make inferences about the likely behavior of a novel category member, whereas children who were not exposed to generic statements did not. These findings suggest that as early as 3 years of age, children's expectations about social categories are influenced by generic statements that occur during brief parent-child interactions.

儿童本质化的社会类别以及儿童对这些类别形成的期望类型存在相当大的差异，这表明儿童的本质主义信念是由环境输入塑造的。先前的研究表明，接触关于社会类别的一般性陈述会促进 4.5 至 8 岁儿童的本质主义信念。然而，到了这个年龄，孩子们形成了相当强烈的本质主义信念，因此，当本质主义信仰首次开始出现时，一般性陈述是否会影响儿童对社会类别的期望，这一点尚不清楚。此外，在先前的研究中，一般性陈述是由实验者提供并仔细控制的，因此，如果这些陈述发生在限制较少的环境中，例如父母给孩子读图画书，这些陈述是否会产生同样的影响尚不清楚。目前的研究通过调查在与父母的图画书互动中发表的一般性陈述是否会影响 3 岁儿童对新社会类别成员的期望，从而解决了这些悬而未决的问题。我们的研究结果表明，在绘本互动过程中听到一般性陈述的儿童使用社会群体成员资格来推断新类别成员的可能行为，而未接触过一般性陈述的儿童则没有。这些发现表明，早在 3 岁时，儿童的