Essentialist Beliefs About Status-Related Social Categories in China

China’s economic landscape has changed considerably in recent years, raising questions of how Chinese individuals reason about economic categories. The present study examined whether Chinese individuals hold essentialist beliefs about socioeconomic status (SES) and residency, a salient category in China that is usually passed from parent to child and determines access to public services. We also examined whether Chinese adults’ essentialist beliefs varied with their perception of their social status, as shown in other cultures. To address these questions, 356 Chinese students in Shanghai with or without Shanghai residency completed a battery of measures assessing essentialist beliefs about SES and residency. Results showed that participants essentialized both categories along some dimensions: they treated them as causally informative natural categories but did not believe they were biologically based. Participants with higher subjective SES were more likely to essentialize both SES and residency, while participants who identified with a more prestigious residency were more likely to essentialize residency. This study provides the first evidence that Chinese individuals essentialize residency. Our findings also suggest that the positive association between social status and essentialist beliefs extends to the Chinese cultural context and holds across different types of social standing, such as SES and residency.