📋 Essentialism in Everyday Thought
Essentialism is the idea that the way we categorize the people and things around us reflects their inner and essential nature, that our categories capture “natural kinds” in the word. This idea seems to be built in to the human mind since it spontaneously appears in both historical and childhood development, in spite of the fact that the categories that we use are more imposed on things rather than found in them. This article explains essentialism and shows how it is a feature of our everyday thinking about the people and things we encounter.
Essentialism in Everyday Thought
Don’t come at me but this article really molded my now newly-based knowledge on “essentialism”. And with the information from post slideshows and crash-courses, I am assured that essentialism is formally based on the observations and innate potential of one’s own understanding of the world. Above all, categorizing yields to one’s different processes and knowledge-based information.
I found this article really interesting. As someone who has worked at a childcare center for several years, you definitely notice certain ways of thinking that are not present in adults. I like how this article explained the differences between how essentialism is presented through children and how it shows in adults.
I found this article and topic in general very interesting. I had never perception on categorizing yeilds to ones different knowlegde based information. I feel as though the most important part of the entire article was stated right in the begging after the bullet points. After reading this I have question in my head about this topic. Do you think the results would be different if we did this study but only on one gender?Would it change completely?
As someone who teaches ESL to children, I have had my kids in the classroom read many things and have noticed how they might know differences in things but they cannot truly make out what they are as the article says. Personally, I believe essentialism is taught from the beginning of someone’s life such as when a child is born and depending on the sex is dressed in pink or blue clothing. Another example I can think of is when a child is given a doll when they are a girl or a toy car or dinosaur to play with depending on the sex of the child.
A lot of this article reminded me of my childhood development classes that I took when I used to be a psychology major. We had discussed essentialism and the parts that nature and nurture took into a child’s thinking and perception of the world. I believe a lot of it is taught, but some is innate as well.
After observing this article I was very interested in figuring out the importance of essentialism. By breaking categorizing people it reflects your inner self and what you surround yourself with.