DO CHILDREN HAVE A THEORY OF RACE

In recent years a number of studies have detailed young children's enr iched, domain-specific, and theory-like understanding in several cogni tive domains, including naive biology, naive psychology, and reasoning about physical objects. With few exceptions, students of cognition ha ve not considered the possibility that the acquisition and representat ion of social categories may also be governed by a specialized faculty for understanding. Rather, most accounts of children's social categor ization assume that the classification of the human realm is derived f rom observations of superficial differences in appearance and does not include expectations of deeper commonalities among category members. Five experiments are reported that challenge this view. The results in dicate that young children's inferences about human racial variation i nvolve domain-specific reasoning that parallels but is distinct from c ommon sense understanding of naive biology. These findings have implic ations for our understanding of the transfer of knowledge across domai ns and for determining the appropriate level of description of domain- specific devices.