Does essentialism affect individual difference of racial categorization threshold?

Modelling individual difference in visual categorization.

Recent years has seen growing interest in understanding, characterizing, and explaining individual differences in visual cognition. We focus here on individual differences in visual categorization. Categorization is the fundamental visual ability to group different objects together as the same kind of thing. Research on visual categorization and category learning has been significantly informed...

Essentialism and Racial Bias Jointly Contribute to the Categorization of Multiracial Individuals.

Categorizations of multiracial individuals provide insight into the psychological mechanisms driving social stratification, but few studies have explored the interplay of cognitive and motivational underpinnings of these categorizations. In the present study, we integrated research on racial essentialism (i.e., the belief that race demarcates unobservable and immutable properties) and negativit...

Essentialism Promotes Racial Prejudice by Increasing Endorsement of Social Hierarchies

Why do essentialist beliefs promote prejudice? We proposed that essentialist beliefs increase prejudice toward Black people because they imply that existing social hierarchies reflect a naturally occurring structure. We tested this hypothesis in three studies (N 1⁄4 621). Study 1 revealed that racial essentialism was associated with increased prejudice toward Blacks among both White and Black a...

Deference and Essentialism in the Categorization of Chemical Kinds

Psychological essentialism has been subject to much debate. Yet a key implication – that people should defer to experts in categorizing natural kinds – has not been widely examined. Three experiments examine deference in the categorization of chemical kinds. The first establishes borderline cases used in the second and third. These latter show limited deference to experts, and some deference to...

Does Patient-Centered Care affect Racial Disparities in Health?