Psychological Essentialism

Psychological Essentialism

Psychological essentialism is the belief that a category has an immutable underlying essence which causes its observable features and licenses inference about features you have not observed. Knowing a thing is a tiger is what lets you assume things about it that nobody told you, and what makes you treat those things as fixed. Applied to objects it is often useful. Applied to people it is a fixed mindset about persons, and that is where it does its damage. The literature is genuine; the secondary account this page draws on reports it with no citations at all, which is why the page is marked mixed.

What it is

The working scheme has four criteria for an essentialist belief. Causal mechanisms, where the essence produces the surface features. Innate potential, where the essence is there from the start. Immutability, where it does not change. And inductive potential, where knowing the category tells you things you have not observed.

Alongside those sit six features of essentialist thinking: discreteness, biological basis, immutability, informativeness, consistency and inherence.

The six-feature scheme is Nick Haslam's, and the source this page draws on never names him in its prose. Haslam and Levy's 2006 paper appears in that chapter's bibliography and is never brought into the argument. Susan Gelman, Douglas Medin and Myron Rothbart, who built the developmental and social-cognitive foundations the chapter stands on, are absent from prose and bibliography alike. The identification of Haslam is this publication's, not the book's. A reader of that chapter is handed a six-part taxonomy with nobody attached to it.

In effect

The finding worth keeping, and the reason this page is not simply a complaint, is about consequences. Essentialist thinking predicts stereotype use, and the more strongly a person endorses essentialism the more strongly they reject the possibility of change. That second clause is the practically important one. Essentialism is not just a belief about what people are. It is a belief about what they can stop being, and it therefore governs how someone reacts to evidence that a person or a group has changed.

Where the traditions pull apart is on universality. One treats essentialism as an early-emerging, cross-culturally general cognitive default, close to a design feature of human categorisation. The other treats the specific social essentialism that drives stereotyping as substantially shaped by the categories a culture makes salient, so that which groups get essentialised varies enormously even if the reasoning style does not. Both have support.

This publication's reading is that the reasoning style is broad and the targets are learned. That keeps the developmental evidence intact without letting a phrase like natural-born essentialists become an excuse, and it is also the reading that makes the stereotype finding actionable rather than fatalistic.

That phrase is worth grading on its own. The source closes the passage with it as an epigram. It is memorable, it reads as a conclusion, and it rests on nothing offered in the chapter: no developmental evidence, no cross-cultural sample, no study. The universality claim is a serious position in the literature and also a contested one, and an epigram closes a debate the chapter never opens.

What it does not say

It does not say essentialist reasoning is wrong about everything. Applied to natural kinds it is often useful and sometimes correct.

It does not say the tendency is fixed. The reasoning style appears broad; which categories get essentialised varies with what a culture makes salient.

It does not arrive here with numbers. The stereotype and change-rejection findings are real and are reported in the source with no citation, no sample and no effect size, so nothing quantitative is carried.

It does not settle the universality question. That is live, and the epigram usually used to settle it is an assertion rather than a finding.

Sources

  1. Haslam, N., & Levy, S. R. (2006). The six-feature scheme. Present in the bibliography of the chapter used here and never engaged with in its prose. Identified by this publication, not by the book.
  2. Gelman, S. A., Medin, D. L., & Rothbart, M. The developmental and social-cognitive foundations. Absent from the source's prose and bibliography alike.
  3. Furnham, A. The New Psychology, ch. 31. Four criteria and six features given with no attribution in the prose. Samples, effect sizes and years for the stereotype and change-rejection findings are not given.