Just like how narrowing the scope of a story can limit our understanding of its characters, correcting generic statements can shape children’s beliefs about different categories. Two studies with 4- to 7-year-old children explored how correcting generics affected their understanding of social and animal kinds, as well as gender. When generics were corrected to refer to a single individual, children were less likely to believe that the category could explain the behavior of its members. However, when the scope was broadened to a superordinate category, endorsement of gender norms decreased. Correcting generics did not affect beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences. These findings suggest that additional mechanisms, such as causal reasoning about shared features, contribute to the development of essentialist beliefs. The results shed light on how generics shape children’s perceptions of categories and provide practical insights for adults to correct problematic generics, such as gender stereotypes, that children encounter in their daily lives.

Abstract
Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes”) leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to a single individual limited beliefs that the referenced categories could explain what their members would be like while broadening the scope to a superordinate category (Study 2) uniquely limited endorsement of gender norms. Across both studies, correcting generics did not alter beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences, suggesting that additional mechanisms (e.g., causal reasoning about shared features) contribute to the development of full-blown essentialist beliefs. These results help illuminate the mechanisms by which generics lead children to view categories as having rich inductive and causal potential; in particular, they suggest that children interpret generics as signals that speakers in their community view the referenced categories as meaningful kinds that support generalization. The findings also point the way to concrete suggestions for how adults can effectively correct problematic generics (e.g., gender stereotypes) that children may hear in daily life.

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