Un cerebro para dominarlos a todos II

Segunda entrega de un cerebro para dominarlos a todos

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19058796

God's categories: the effect of religiosity on children's teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories.

Diesendruck G, Haber L.

Source

Department of Psychology and Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. dieseng@mail.biu.ac.il

Abstract

Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique nature and purpose. These 

implications closely correspond to what some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and 

teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what extent the belief in God as creator 

of categories is related to the mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli 

secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to questions assessing these three types 

of beliefs. The results revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children with 

respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of animal category membership, and their 

teleological construal of artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox children with 

respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of social category membership, and their 

teleological construal of both animal and social categories. These findings intimate that while 

essentialist beliefs about animals, and teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input 

in order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and teleological beliefs about both 

animal and social categories do.