Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld is an American anthropologist, cognitive scientist, academic, and author. He is a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research as well as a professor emeritus in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Hirschfeld is most known for his work on cognitive development, social reasoning and categorization, particularly the conceptual development of race and ethnicity. Among his authored works are publications in academic journals, including Cognition, Cognitive Psychology, Current Biology, and American Anthropologist as well as books such as Race in the Making: Culture and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds, Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (co-edited with S. A. Gelman) and Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference (co-edited with R. Viale & D Andler).

Education Hirschfeld went to high school at The New Hampton School, in New Hampshire. He completed his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1971. He then obtained an M.A. in Anthropology and an M. Phil., both from Columbia University in 1975. Later, he earned his PhD in Anthropology from the same institution in 1984.

Publications Hirschfeld has contributed to books throughout his career. In 1994, he co-edited Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. The book explored the claim that human cognition consists of specialized, domain-specific abilities rather than a general problem-solving mechanism, compiling essays from various disciplines to support this perspectives. His 1996 book Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds argued that racial thinking arose from a specialized cognitive ability for understanding human kinds, challenging the view that race was purely a social construct. His 1988 study examined how young children developed mental representations of racial and ethnic categories, arguing in counterpoint to social constructivists that the acquisition of racial and ethnic concepts is markedly consistent across cultures despite significant cross-cultural variations in social classifications. In a widely cited 1995 paper, he empirically explored young children's sophisticated, domain-specific reasoning about racial variation, challenging the view that the acquisition of racial concepts relied principally on superficial appearance. The study presented five experiments revealing children's theory-like understanding of social categories, with implications for theorizing cross-domain knowledge transfer. In the same year, he investigated children's expectations about the inheritability of racial features and racial categories, revealing that by preadolescence, children typically expect mixed-race children to categorically share the identity of the minority parent (consistent with the one-drop rule) but also to have unambiguously Black physical features (despite little evidence that they are taught this). Strikingly, there is individual variation in these expectations, as this is shaped by the communities the children live in rather than by their race.

In a set of widely cited studies published in 1997, Hirschfeld and Gelman investigated preschoolers' understanding of the relationship between language, social group membership, and various aspects of the social environment, finding that children attributed language differences to certain social categories and clothing and architectural styles. The findings also suggested children coordinated knowledge across domains and explored the underlying mechanisms driving these associations. In a 1999 essay examining the concept of essence in a range of empirical domains besides folkbiology, he, along with Gelman, challenged the widely-held claim that essentialist representations are rooted in folkbiology. His 2004 collaboration with Dan Sperber explored how human-specific cognitive abilities, both general and domain-specific, contribute to the emergence and evolution of diverse cultures, integrating perspectives from developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive anthropology. With Frith, White, and Bartmess, in a 2007 study, he provided the first persuasive evidence that social reasoning about group affiliation is independent of Theory of Mind, one that provides a distinct modality of reasoning about behavior governed by a special-purpose cognitive device for folk sociology. Through his 2013 work, he argued that social group affiliation and social roles shape human behavior, emphasizing that actions are influenced more by these aspects of the social environment than individual intentions. The essay also critiqued the over-estimation of mentalizing as a modality for interpreting and predicting behavior, suggesting that these judgments are often independent of attributions to internal states.

Hirschfeld's lab conducted work showing that preverbal infants' expectations about social affiliation are consistent with (and precursor to) later emerging patterns of folk sociological reasoning. In contrast, infants in a control condition (in which the group members perform the same movements while crossing the screen but in the absence of a third party) did not differ in how long they looked at the subsequent cohering and dispersing events.

Personal life Hirschfeld lives in New York City with his wife, Ann Laura Stoler, who is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City.