ABSTRACT
Three experiments are reported that examine psychological essentialism (Medin and Ortony 1989). They seek to replicate and extend one of Gelman & Wellman's (1991) widely cited series of studies concerning the innate potential of seeds. 4-year-olds in their study judged that a seed would grow into the type of item from which it was taken, rather than be influenced by its environment and grow into something else. Gelman and Wellman found that older 4 year olds overwhelmingly gave answers in line with essentialism. Younger 4 year olds answered at chance but their answers were bimodal – 7 children's answers were essentialist and 5 children's were non-essentialist. The first experiment failed to replicate Gelman and Wellman's findings and found no difference in the answers provided by the 4 and 5 year old children, neither group giving predominantly essentialist answers. A second experiment tested children from schools of a different kind and again partially failed to replicate their results. One group of children, who had been explicitly taught about how seeds grow, tended to give essentialist answers. Finally, a third experiment established that earlier failures to obtain essentialist answers were not due to the children having difficulty understanding the task. Overall, these findings cast considerable doubt on the support claimed for psychological essentialism on the basis of children's understanding of innate potential.
