Psychological essentialism reconsidered : a domain-specific causal framework and its implications for constructive interventions

Psychological essentialism involves conceptualizing certain categories as more natural, having sharper, more immutable boundaries, and more homogeneous members. Importantly, members of essentialized categories are viewed as sharing some non-obvious, innate, internal essence, such as DNA, that causes members to develop category-typical characteristics. While essentialist thought may seem innocuous when applied to certain categories, such as species kinds, the results are far more harmful when applied to social categories, such as gender, sexual orientation, or race. An ever-growing body of evidence suggests that a wide range of discriminatory and harmful attitudes and behaviors directed at oppressed social groups are strongly associated with or caused by psychological essentialism. This dissertation is primarily motivated by the urgent need to develop practical and constructive interventions to mitigate the range of harmful downstream beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors associated with essentialist thought when applied to social categories. To that end, Chapters 2 and 3 focus on articulating and arguing for a unified framework for understanding core aspects of essentialist thought, named Domain-Specific, Causal Essentialism. Chapter 1 presents an overview of the literature on the harmful effects of essentialist thought. Chapter 2 reviews several accounts of psychological systems responsible for essentialist thought and argues that the developmental pattern in children is best explained by a more domain-specific, functionally-specific, nativist account. Chapter 3 argues that a crucial component of concepts representing an essentialized category is information pertaining to the causal mechanisms by which category members develop category-typical traits. Having laid out an account of essentialist thought, Chapter 4 argues that effective interventions to the harmful outcomes of essentialist thought need to provide alternative causal explanations for the development of category-typical traits. More specifically, a central component of essentialist thought is explaining category membership and the development of category typical traits by appeal to a cause internal to the category member. This chapter argues that explaining category-property relationships with appeal to a stable, external cause, such as a structural explanation, can effectively disrupt some of the harmful, downstream effects of essentialist thought.