The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

And getting children to think of a group of people as a kind is very easy. The psychologist Marjorie Rhodes and her colleagues did the following simple experiment. They showed four-year-olds pictures of a fictional kind of person they called a Zarpie. The pictures were male and female, black, white, Latino, and Asian, young and old. With one group of kids, the experimenters made lots of generic remarks about these imaginary people—“Zarpies are scared of ladybugs,” and the like. With another group of kids, they avoided generics. (“Look at this Zarpie! He’s afraid of ladybugs!”) A couple of days later they showed the kids a Zarpie and said that he made a buzzing sound. It turned out that the kids who’d heard a lot of generics about Zarpies were much more likely to believe that all Zarpies made buzzing sounds. Generic talk encouraged them to think of Zarpies as a kind of person. And once kids think of Zarpies as a kind of person, they’re more likely to infer that the behavior of one Zarpie reflects the nature of all Zarpies, that buzzing flows from the Zarpie essence.