How do people understand what makes a person Muslim, Hindu, or Christian? Social categories are sometimes viewed as natural kinds, where category membership is believed to derive from an underlying biological essence. Current theorizing posits this tendency to be motivated by contextual features such as saliency of categories, or quality of intergroup relations. Accordingly, along with categories such as ethnicity or gender, religious categories may be susceptible to essentialism in contexts of violent conflict along religious lines. An alternative perspective, drawn from the literature that links the spread of aspects of religious cognition to the growth of large-scale cooperative societies, is that religious category membership could be perceived as especially transformable by context and practice. We investigated essentialist reasoning about religious categories heavily implicated in intergroup conflicts in two populations: Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and citizens of the United States. In four experiments (N = 2578), we employed variations of the adoption task to compare how people reason about membership in religious and national categories. Results show that people are less likely to believe that one’s religion (compared to one’s nationality) is passed on through some type of biological mechanism and so is “fixed at birth”. Thus, religious categories seem particularly resistant to essentialist reasoning, even when the social context appears to motivate such reasoning. Implications for understanding essentialist reasoning and the role of religion in intergroup conflict are discussed.

Every year, during the month of Ramadan, people of Muslim faith fast by not eating or drinking between sunrise and sunset. This is likely to have physiological and psychological consequences for the individuals who fast, as well as societal and economic impacts on the wider population. Here, we investigate whether this type of fasting influences fasters’ cognition through a scarcity mindset. In Study 1, we find that during Ramadan but not after, preceding questions about food undermine fasting subjects’ accuracy and reaction times on a subsequent cognitive control task. Study 2 shows that food-related probes impair cognitive control in the fasters who had a meal within the past eight hours. Beyond eight hours, control and food-reminded subjects both perform poorly. Implications for research on cognition under scarcity are discussed.

Transgender rights and discrimination against transgender people are growing public policy issues. Theorizing from social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology suggests that beyond attitudes, discrimination against transgender people may derive from folk theories about what gender is and where it comes from. Transgender identity is met with hostility, in part, because it poses a challenge to the lay view that gender is determined at birth, and based on observable physical and behavioral characteristics. Here, in two pre-registered studies (N = 1323), we asked American adults to indicate the gender of a transgender target who either altered their biology through surgical interventions or altered their outward appearance: to what extent is it their birth-assigned gender or their self-identified gender? Responses correlate strongly with affect toward transgender people, measured by feeling thermometers, yet predict views on transgender people’s right to use their preferred bathrooms above and beyond feelings. Compared to male participants, female participants judge the person’s gender more in line with the self-identified gender than the birth-assigned gender. This is consistent with social and psychological theories that posit high status (e.g., men) and low status (e.g., women) members of social classification systems view group hierarchies in more and less essentialist ways respectively. Gender differences in gender category beliefs decrease with religiosity and conservatism, and are smaller in higher age groups. These results suggest that folk theories of gender, or beliefs about what gender is and how it is determined have a unique role in how transgender people are viewed and treated. Moreover, as evident by the demographic variability of gender category beliefs, folk theories are shaped by social and cultural forces and are amenable to interventions. They offer an alternative pathway to measure policy support and possibly change attitude toward transgender people.