Having Essentialist Beliefs Predicts People’s Attitudes about Social Groups

With which statement do you agree more?

Statement A: People can behave in ways that seem ambiguous, but the central aspects of their character are clear-cut.

Statement B: It is never possible to judge how someone will react in new social situations.

These statements tap into a belief known as essentialism, the tendency to believe that the differences that we see between individual people – and between social groups – are natural and unchangeable. Just as people differ in their levels of extraversion or agreeableness, they also differ in the degree to which they believe in essentialism. Those who agree with statement A (and other statements like it) are considered high in essentialism. Those who agree with statement B and others like it are considered low in essentialism. People with essentialist views tend to use more stereotypes, are less likely to pursue interactions with people of other races, and report less positive feelings toward mixed-race individuals.

We were interested in how essentialism might relate to people’s levels of racial prejudice. We reasoned that people high in essentialism may be more likely to take their observations about another person’s behavior to the “next level” by inferring that his or her behaviors reflect what that person, and other people who are similar to him or her, are truly like. For example, after learning about a Muslim person who committed an act of terrorism, a person high in essentialism might be especially likely to view Muslim people as terrorists. We tested this general idea in two studies. 

In our first study, we examined the link between essentialism and people’s racial attitudes towards Black Americans. We asked 500 Americans to fill out a measure of essentialism (from which statements A and B above were borrowed). Then we measured their attitudes towards Black Americans in two ways. The first measure was a survey with statements like, “How negative or positive do you feel toward Black people?” Our second measure was a less obvious measure of racial bias called the Implicit Associations Test (IAT). Our version of the IAT measured people’s tendency to associate “Black people” with negative emotionally-laden words.  We found that people’s levels of prejudice towards Black Americans, as measured by both the survey questions and the IAT, were associated with higher levels of essentialist thinking.  People higher in essentialism seem to harbor more racial prejudice towards Black Americans.

But why was this the case? Essentialism might lead to stronger prejudice because people high in essentialism are more likely to generalize the behaviors of one group member to other members of the group. If this is the case, then essentialist thinking should be linked to generalizing about groups even in ways that result in more positive attitudes about groups. For instance, after learning that some Muslims engaged in charitable behaviors, people high in essentialism might  associate Muslims with generosity more strongly than people low in essentialism.

In a second study, we measured the essentialism levels of 3,300 Americans, then described an imaginary group called the Laapians to them. Some people were told that Laapian individuals had engaged in 20 bad behaviors (such as parking in a space reserved for the handicapped). Others learned that Laapians had engaged in 20 good behaviors (such as they helped an elderly man who dropped some packages). A final group learned that Laapians had engaged in 20 neutral behaviors (they went to work). Participants then rated their attitudes towards Laapians as a whole.

As we expected, people higher in essentialism formed stronger attitudes towards Laapians based on learning that some individual Laapians had done some good or bad things.  This was true whether people thought the Laapians behaved poorly or well. Thus, among people who were high in essentialism, those who learned that some Laapians behaved positively had more positive attitudes towards Laapians as a whole. After learning exactly the same information, people low in essentialism formed weaker attitudes about the Laapian group. Again, this pattern of essentialism was true for both nice and nasty behavior. 

Our results shed light on why two people can draw different conclusions after witnessing a person perform the same behavior.  People high in essentialism are more likely to see the behaviors of individual group members as indicative of what all members of that group are like. But people high in essentialism are more likely to form negative and positive attitudes about the members of social groups.  Essentialism is not the same as prejudice.

If you’re concerned about forming unfair biases toward groups on the basis of the behaviors of a few individuals, here are a few strategies you could try. First, when you witness someone’s behavior and find yourself thinking that it is representative of their group, you could remind yourself that human behavior can be caused by many things, including things that have little or nothing to do with the person’s characteristics. When you witness a person acting a certain way, it is also helpful to think about the situational pressures that might have led the person to act in that manner. It could also help to imagine yourself acting in a similar way and identifying some of the pressures that could lead you to behave that way. Finally, if you ever see a Laapian behave poorly, you can remind yourself of a counterexample – in which a Laapian behaved kindly or heroically.  In general, thinking more deeply about the events and people that you witness may help reduce your likelihood of harboring unfair biases, be they positive or negative.


For Further Reading

Chen, J. M., & Ratliff, K. A. (2018). Psychological essentialism predicts intergroup bias. Social Cognition, 36(3), 301-323.

Jacqueline Chen is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah, where she directs the Social Cognition and Intergroup Perception Lab. Her research examines issues related to social perception, diversity, and intergroup relations.

Kate A. Ratliff is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida and Executive Director of Project Implicit. Her research focuses on prejudice, stereotyping, and other intergroup biases.

The Inherence Heuristic in Explanation May Be at the Root of Several Social Psychological Phenomena

Everyone knows the Mona Lisa. It is, perhaps, the most iconic piece of art in the world. But why is it so famous? If you are like many people, you will begin your search for an explanation of the painting’s fame by recalling what you know about good art and about the Mona Lisa. Good art is masterful, and Leonardo da Vinci is a master. Good art fascinates and challenges us, and the Mona Lisa’s expression is a puzzle for us to unlock.

But what if the painting’s fame were merely an accident of history? Until 1911, the Mona Lisa simply wasn’t very well known, just a minor painting in the Louvre’s vast collection. But when a museum employee walked off with the portrait, the theft—and the two-year saga of its solving—brought the Mona Lisa into the popular consciousness. Duncan Watts argues compellingly that this event created a self-sustaining cycle of popularity: the painting’s fame makes it an easy reference, and the frequent references keep the painting famous.

That our first instinct in explaining the Mona Lisa’s iconic status is to ignore this kind of historical story may be a clue to the way we approach explanation more generally. In a forthcoming paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Andrei Cimpian and I argue that people approach explanation in much the same way they approach other tasks requiring cognitive effort: using a fast heuristic that capitalizes on easily accessible information, assembling these bits of information into a sensible story. As soon as a satisfactory story (such as, “the Mona Lisa is popular because her expression captures our attention”) comes to mind, we move on to something else.

We named this process the inherence heuristic because this way of going about explanation biases the stories people come up with in an interesting way. Specifically, the information people are most likely to recall about the objects they are explaining (the Mona Lisa and art, in this example) tend to be what we called inherent features—those things that constitute the objects, such as their perceptual properties (the Mona Lisa’s smile), physical properties (the oil paint used in creating the image), and so on.

People are likely to ignore extrinsic—historical, cultural, and so on—forces simply because they are exposed to them less frequently than inherent features. People see what the Mona Lisa looks like much more than they hear the story of its theft a hundred years ago. Such facts, even if someone might have encountered them before, will require more effort to recall, and putting in the effort to recall them doesn’t seem worthwhile once that person already has an explanation constructed. Why fix what’s not broken?

Of course, some searches for an explanation will lead people to use these extrinsic factors. Extrinsic information may be highly accessible when people are explaining their own behavior (as noted in the actor-observer bias in attribution), when they have expert knowledge about the subject of the explanation, or when they have already heard a compelling extrinsic explanation. And, as with other heuristics, people may also be willing to spend more time or effort on overriding their intuitive explanations when they are motivated for accuracy, when they are not cognitively busy, or when they are just the sorts of people who like to think deeply about things.

In our BBS paper, we argue that this shortcut to explanation may serve as a common foundation for a number of social psychological phenomena, from how people categorize and think about social groups (psychological essentialism) to how they make inferences based on others’ behavior (the correspondence bias) to why they accept inequality (system justification). In each case, we observe the tendency to attribute the present state of the world (girls wear pink, John was late to our meeting, the children of rich parents grow up to make more money) to the underlying, inherent properties of the entities involved (girl DNA makes girls like pink, John is lazy, rich kids are born smarter and harder working).

Consider the example of psychological essentialism. When children first start asking questions about why social categories have the properties they do, they don’t have the kind of complex understanding of sociological and economic forces that would lead them to attribute these patterns to cultural influences. For example, in explaining why girls wear pink, they are unlikely to think of socialization and marketing campaigns that encourage strong gender divisions and reinforce the girl-pink pairing. Instead, they likely rely on highly accessible stereotypical information about girls to do the explaining: Girls are delicate like flowers; pink is a common color for flowers; pink is a good color for girls because it matches their delicate nature.

As children repeatedly make these kinds of inferences about different social categories, they may develop the intuition that social categories like gender have underlying properties that determine what they are like. This intuition may be integrated with the kinds of biological knowledge that children learn (about hormones, DNA, brains, blood, etc.) into beliefs that are generally called psychological essentialism: the idea that social categories are based in biologically real and natural “essences” (e.g., girl DNA) that cause their external properties (e.g., liking pink, being delicate). In a  paper we recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Andrei and I provide some evidence that use of the inherence heuristic is causally linked to psychological essentialism in adults, and ongoing research in our lab suggests that the same relationship holds for children.

Similar evidence is emerging from our lab regarding the sources of the correspondence bias and system justification. We find that these phenomena are linked to reliance on the inherence heuristic in both children and adults, suggesting a common source for several psychological phenomena. The search for explanations is a fundamental component of our experience, making the inherence heuristic a pervasive and influential feature of human cognition.


Erika Salomon (@ecsalomon) is a PhD candidate in social psychology at the University of Illinois whose work focuses on the role of heuristics in social judgment and decision-making.