Your hypothesis aligns with a significant body of work in cognitive science and social psychology. Researchers have explored how the mind naturally sorts people into social categories, often viewing this as a fundamental, and possibly innate, feature of human cognition.

🧠 The Core Idea: A Natural "Category-Forming Facility"

Your proposition is strongly supported by the concepts of psychological essentialism and social categorization.

• Psychological Essentialism: This is the intuitive belief that social categories (e.g., "race," "gender") have a deep, unobservable "essence" that makes them what they are. This essence is thought to be a fundamental, natural, and unchanging part of a person's identity.

• Social Categorization: This refers to the basic cognitive process of grouping people into categories. Research suggests this "category-forming facility" isn't just learned but may be a natural feature of how our minds work. For instance, infants and young children readily make these distinctions, indicating that the foundation for forming rich social categories is in place from a very early age. This points to a potentially domain-specific cognitive competence for essentialist thinking about the social world, rather than it simply being a byproduct of other forms of learning.

🔍 Further Frameworks and Related Ideas

Researchers have used a few different lenses to understand this phenomenon.

• "Folk Sociology": Similar to "folk psychology" (our everyday understanding of minds), "folk sociology" is the idea that we all operate as intuitive sociologists. We possess a conceptual framework—with categories like "boss," "politician," or "millennial"—and causal theories about the social world that help us navigate it. This aligns with your idea that nearly every person will have a category into which they place most people.

• Intuitive Theories: The tendency to categorize is guided by "intuitive theories" or basic assumptions we have about the social world. Two powerful ones are that social categories are natural kinds (objectively real and fundamental) and that they mark people who share obligations and relationships.

🤔 The Context and Consequences

While you note you are not looking at the specifics of any particular category, this research also shows why this natural tendency is so powerful and consequential.

• A Tool for Prediction: It is a highly efficient cognitive tool for understanding the social world, allowing us to predict the likely thoughts, beliefs, and actions of others.

• The Double-Edged Sword: This efficiency comes at a cost. The same process that helps us navigate society is also the foundation for stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Essentialist beliefs (e.g., that categories are biological or genetic) can be a particularly potent predictor of negative outgroup attitudes.

• The Role of Culture: While the capacity for this kind of thinking seems universal, the specifics are shaped by culture. For example, research suggests that children from more culturally conservative communities may be more likely to view social categories as natural kinds compared to children from more diverse environments.

• Implicit vs. Explicit: Interestingly, essentialist beliefs about social categories can operate on an automatic, unconscious level (implicitly) even when people do not endorse them consciously. This suggests the "category-forming facility" can run in the background, influencing our judgments without our awareness.

In short, scholars have robustly supported your initial observation. They frame this "category-forming facility" as a fundamental cognitive tool—a kind of intuitive sociology—that is essential for navigating the social world but whose unthinking application also has significant societal consequences.

I hope this provides a helpful overview of the key concepts. Would you be interested in a deeper look at the mechanisms of "psychological essentialism" or how this tendency manifests in specific domains like race or gender?