Psychological Essentialism at the Explicit and Implicit Levels: The Unique Status of Social Categories

Given the critical role that psychological essentialism is theorized to play in the development of stereotyping and prejudice, researchers have increasingly examined the extent to which and when children essentialize different social categories. We review and integrate the types of contextual and cultural variation that have emerged in the literature on social essentialism. We review variability in the development of social essentialism depending on experimental tasks, participant social group membership, language use, psychological salience of category kinds, exposure to diversity, and cultural norms. We also discuss future directions for research that would help to identify the contexts in which social essentialism is less likely to develop in order to inform interventions that could reduce social essentialism and possible negative consequences for intergroup relations.

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The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x13002197 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 37 (5) ◽

pp. 461-480 ◽

Cited By ~ 86

Author(s):

Andrei Cimpian ◽

Erika Salomon

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Process ◽

Common Belief ◽

Human Reasoning ◽

Social Categories ◽

Psychological Essentialism ◽

Making Sense ◽

The Common ◽

Implicit Cognitive Process ◽

The Relationship ◽

Potential Precursor

AbstractWe propose that human reasoning relies on aninherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) predominantly in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is a delicate color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this article, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose thatessentialism – which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful essences – emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the report, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens's K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this article illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology.

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Separating kindhood from naturalness: Kinds are diverse in causal structure

10.31234/osf.io/q3zg5 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Alexander Noyes ◽

Yarrow Dunham

Keyword(s):

Factor Analysis ◽

Predictive Validity ◽

Real World ◽

Natural Kinds ◽

Causal Structure ◽

Social Categories ◽

Psychological Essentialism ◽

Socially Constructed ◽

Nominal Categories ◽

Consistent Support

[UPDATED 3/11/2020] This paper proposes that the richness of a category (i.e., high inductive potential, non-accidental properties, and generalizable causal structure) is conceptually distinct from its being natural or socially constructed. To test this account, we explore beliefs related to the classic distinction between natural kinds and nominal categories. Specifically, we subjected these beliefs, across diverse categories, to exploratory factor analysis (Studies 1 and 2), examined the inferential connections between these beliefs using experimental manipulations of novel categories (Study 3), and tested the discriminant and predictive validity of these beliefs in the context of real-world social categories (Studies 4 and 5). We find consistent support that rich structure (kindhood) is conceptually distinct from that structure being natural or social (naturalness). We argue that ‘psychological essentialism’ is best understood as a circumscribed set of beliefs related to naturalness, and that referring to kindhood as a type of essentialist belief is inaccurate.

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Value-based Essentialism: Essentialist Beliefs About Social Groups With Shared Values

10.31234/osf.io/m2eby ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

April Bailey ◽

Joshua Knobe ◽

George Newman

Keyword(s):

Social Group ◽

Social Groups ◽

Shared Values ◽

English Speakers ◽

Social Categories ◽

Psychological Essentialism ◽

A Value ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range ◽

Inductive Generalizations

Psychological essentialism has played an important role in social psychology, informing influential theories of stereotyping and prejudice as well as questions about wrongdoers’ accountability and their ability to change. In the existing literature, essentialism is often tied to beliefs in shared biology—i.e., the extent to which members of a social group are seen as having the same underlying biological features. Here we investigate the possibility of “value-based essentialism” in which people think of certain social groups in terms of an underlying essence, but that essence is understood as a value. Study 1 explored beliefs about a wide range of social groups and found that both groups with shared biology (e.g., women) and shared values (e.g., hippies) elicited similar general essentialist beliefs relative to more incidental social categories (e.g., English-speakers). In Studies 2-4, participants who read about a group either as being based in biology or in values reported higher general essentialist beliefs compared to a control condition. Because biological essences about social groups have been connected to a number of downstream consequences, we also investigated two test cases concerning value-based essentialism. In Study 3, beliefs about both shared biology and shared values increased inductive generalizations about the social group relative to control, but in Study 4, only the shared biology condition reduced blame for wrongdoing. Together these findings join with recent work to support a broader theoretical framework of essentialism about social groups that can be arrived at through multiple pathways, including, in the present case, shared values.

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Automatic Stereotype Activation Is Context Dependent

Social Psychology ◽

10.1027/1864-9335/a000019 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 41 (3) ◽

pp. 131-136 ◽

Cited By ~ 35

Author(s):

Catharina Casper ◽

Klaus Rothermund ◽

Dirk Wentura

Keyword(s):

Lexical Decision ◽

Context Information ◽

Decision Task ◽

Social Categories ◽

Priming Effects ◽

Stereotype Activation ◽

Social Stereotypes ◽

Priming Paradigm ◽

Automatic Activation ◽

Mental Schemas

Processes involving an automatic activation of stereotypes in different contexts were investigated using a priming paradigm with the lexical decision task. The names of social categories were combined with background pictures of specific situations to yield a compound prime comprising category and context information. Significant category priming effects for stereotypic attributes (e.g., Bavarians – beer) emerged for fitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a marquee) but not for nonfitting contexts (e.g., in combination with a picture of a shop). Findings indicate that social stereotypes are organized as specific mental schemas that are triggered by a combination of category and context information.

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Cognitive Components of Ingroup Projection

Social Psychology ◽

10.1027/1864-9335/a000156 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 15-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Maya Machunsky ◽

Thorsten Meiser

Keyword(s):

Mental Representation ◽

Cognitive Representation ◽

Social Categories ◽

Projection Model ◽

Minimal Group ◽

Model Experiments ◽

Superordinate Category ◽

Cognitive Components ◽

Per Se

This research investigated whether relative ingroup prototypicality (i.e., the tendency to perceive one’s own ingroup as more prototypical of a superordinate category than the outgroup) can result from a prototype-based versus exemplar-based mental representation of social categories, rather than from ingroup membership per se as previously suggested by the ingroup projection model. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a prototype-based group was perceived as more prototypical of a superordinate category than an exemplar-based group supporting the hypothesis that an intergroup context is not necessary for biased prototypicality judgments. Experiment 3 introduced an intergroup context in a minimal-group-like paradigm. The findings demonstrated that both the kind of cognitive representation and motivational processes contribute to biased prototypicality judgments in intergroup settings.

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