Where does the idea of essentialism come from? In this talk, I argue that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. I argue against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious,instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. I also contest claims that children build up their knowledge of the world based on simple, associative learning strategies, arguing instead that children's concepts are embedded in rich folk theories.
