Psychological essentialism and the structure of concepts

Abstract

Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in cognitive science. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind and cognitive science to social philosophy. This article aims to give philosophers who are new to the topic an overview of the key empirical findings surrounding psychological essentialism, and some of the ways the hypothesis and its related findings have been discussed, extended, and applied in philosophical research.

Is Identity Essentialism a Fundamental Feature of Human Cognition?

“…This ambiguity was eliminated in our other samples (by making the response options more explicit: "YES, there are still lemons" or "NO, there are no more lemons"). Surprisingly, we found almost no relationship between responses to the two scenarios (see also Braisby et al, 1996;Devitt & Porter, 2021;Nichols et al, 2016). Specifically, the withinrespondent point-biserial correlation between responses 6 to the lemons-oranges and mantupwater scenarios was very low: r(1112) = .064, p = .034 (and even lower when we limit ourselves to respondents who were more than 50% certain of their responses in both scenarios: r(910) = .054, p = .103).…”

“…Recent work in experimental semantics has used scenarios about chemical substances, which are inspired by Putnam's thought experiments (e.g., Devitt & Porter, 2021;Genone & Lombrozo, 2012;Haukioja, Nyquist, & Jylkkä, 2021;Jylkkä, Railo, & Haukioja, 2009;Koch & Wiegmann, 2020;Nichols, Pinillos, & Mallon, 2016;Tobia, Newman, & Knobe, 2020; see also Braisby, Franks, & Hampton, 1996;Hampton, Estes, & Simmons, 2007). Overall, eliciting either classification judgments, truth value judgments, or use, this literature casts doubts on whether lay people believe that membership in substances is exclusively constituted by their molecular structure to the exclusion of their observational properties (see also Machery, 2009;Malt, 1994).…”

“…Evidence supporting folk essentialism has accumulated since the 1980s (for an overview, see Gelman, 2003; Neufeld, 2022; Rhodes, 2020). Psychologists have examined the scope of folk essentialism, with the goal of determining which categories lay people essentialize outside the biological domain, and they have found that social categories, such as race and gender, are frequently essentialized (e.g., Birnbaum, Deeb, Segall, Ben‐Eliyahu, & Diesendruck, 2010; Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000; Hirschfeld, 1996; Prentice & Miller, 2006; Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017; Taylor, 1996).…”

Animalistic dehumanisation as a social influence strategy

“…By extension, psychological essentialism is the application of essentialism to humans, considering that humans represent some social categories to which they belong and therefore have some underlying properties that they share with other members – properties that are considered as causally responsible for their attributes (see Neufeld, 2022 ). At the intergroup level, this translates into the notion that groups have permanent and immutable properties, which determine their intrinsic and ontological nature ( Yzerbyt et al, 1997 ), and therefore define what its members are – different groups potentially having different essences.…”

Psychological construction as a theoretical principle for guiding cognitive-behavioral treatments

“…Essentialism suggests that categories we encounter, such as dogs, trees, or birds, have an underlying essence or existence that causally determines what they are (Brick et al, 2022 ; Neufeld, 2022 ). Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that psychological categories (emotions, cognitions, and behaviors) are natural kinds rather than social constructions (Barrett, 2009 ; Brick et al, 2022 ).…”