Beyond the surface: A multi-disciplinary investigation of essentialism

Abstract

Essentialist thinking refers to the intuition that category membership and category-specific features are caused by an internal, invisible, essence. Across three studies, we investigated essentialism from a developmental, a cognitive, and a social perspective. In the first study, using a structured interview, we investigated whether Canadian children aged 5-to-8 hold an essentialist view of national identity, and whether their view differs from that of American children. Compared to older children, younger Canadian children were more likely to believe that Canadian identity was biologically based, and that traits associated with Canadian identity were heritable. However, we found no differences between Canadian and American children in terms of essentialist thinking. In the next study, we tested whether adults obscure their essentialist thinking and whether it may be unveiled by cognitive demand. We presented participants with a switched-at-birth paradigm where some participants were under time pressure and others were not. We found that adults under time pressure were more essentialist about national identity and gender than adults not under time pressure, though we saw no effect on race. This suggests that adults obscure their essentialist thinking, but it can be unveiled during cognitive demand. Finally, we assessed whether essentialist thinking is associated with addiction stigma. We presented participants with fictional news articles about scientific studies to prime either essentialist or anti-essentialist views about addiction. Both participants’ biological and non-biological essentialism were associated with addiction stigma, with the latter being a stronger correlate. This suggests that the extent to which individuals view addiction as a fundamentally distinct category has more impact on stigma than whether adults view addiction as genetically based.