Summary with the article: Essentialist beliefs about social categories - Haslam, Rothschild, Ernst (2000)

This article explores current research and beliefs on social categories and its ontological status, investigating whether members are seen to have fixed and inherent essences. Essentialism is not a unitary concept. In their research they found two independent dimensions with some categories being understood as ‘natural kinds’, and other categories being understood as ‘entitativity or reification’. In addition, there was a negative association between reification and the evaluative status of a category.

Theoretical Introduction

Essentialism has become a key concept in a variety of fields such as Biology, Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology. Although the term ‘essentialism’ is in wide use, there is still a lack of a common definition. In this article they focused on the ‘natural kinds’ and ‘entitavity/reification’ definitions. Natural kinds are believed to have essences, because they have certain necessary microstructures and it is these microstructures that make them what they are. Entitavity, proposed by Campbell, is about the extent to which a social category or social aggregate is understood to be an entity that is coherent, unified and meaningful. In psychology for example, it was demonstrated that entitavity is related to the perceived homogeneity and distinctiveness of a group, due to the belief of an inherent essence. It was also demonstrated that when explaining the behaviour of group members, group entitavity was associated with dispositional attributions instead of situational.

The aim of this study was to try and find out a few unanswered questions that still remain about essentialism. Firstly, it is still unknown to what extent people have essentialist beliefs in regard to social categories. Secondly, the actual structure of essentialist beliefs when it comes to social categories is still not known. Thirdly, it is not known what the association is between essentialist beliefs and the evaluative status of a category. Therefore, this study set out to answer these questions. In addition to answering these questions, the researchers hypothesized that a unitary syndrome would be formed by the essentialist beliefs, and that this would be associated with category devaluation.

Method

In this study they asked 40 undergraduates to rate different social categories on 10 items. 9 of those items were proposed ‘essentialism’ elements, and the 10^th item was to rate the social categories on their evaluative status, such as how they are valued by the general public.

The 9 items which were elements of essentialism were discreteness, uniformity, informativeness, naturalness, immutability, stability, inherence, necessity and exclusivity.

Results

It was found that the structure behind essentialist thinking is best explained by two independent dimensions. The first dimension consists of the essentialist elements that are linked closely to the ‘natural kinds’ concept. These elements were naturalness, discreteness, necessary characteristics, immutability and stability. The second dimension consisted of essentialist elements that are linked to the concept of entitavity and reifications. These elements were informativeness, inherence, uniformity and exclusivity. In addition, it was found that the category domain largely influences the amount of essentialist thinking. Confirming the hypothesis, there was an association between essentialist beliefs and category devaluation.

Discussion

The results proved that essentialism isn’t a unitary concept. Different social categories can be essentialized in two specific ways, through naturalness or through reification/entitavity. The existence of two specific forms of essentialism suggests that different approaches are needed when trying to counter negative evaluations of social groups and categories. If you are trying to change beliefs about social categories that are entitative, then the essentialist elements related to entitative/reification categories need to be targeted, vice versa for the natural kind beliefs.

To date the common challenge against essentialist thinking has been the social constructionist argument. However, this may not be the most productive. Naturalness wasn’t directly associated with low status whereas entitavity was. Therefore, it could be more effective to challenge beliefs regarding entitavity.

To compare to existing theories out there on this matter, the results of this article do not conflict with studies carried out on stereotyping and attribution theory, and could even supplement them. For example, when it comes to stereotyping, the perception of out-groups in regard to extremity and homogeneity biases could be organized partly by the general beliefs about entitavity that people hold. In addition, there is a strong link between the functioning of essentialist beliefs and attributions in regard to social categories and groups. Therefore, the findings from this study on essentialist beliefs could shed light on aspects of stereotyping and prejudice theory, and in general connect different domains of psychological theory to explain social categorization.