Much recent discussion has focused on the nature of artifacts, particularly whether artifacts have essences. While general consensus is that are at least intention-dependent, an equally common view function essentialism about essentially functional objects and membership in artifact kind determined by a particular, shared function. This paper argues false. First, two component conditions given ...

Genetic essentialism is the tendency for people to think in more essentialist ways upon encountering genetic concepts. The current studies assessed whether genetic essentialist biases would also be evident at the automatic level. In two studies, using different versions of the Implicit Association Test, we found that participants were faster to categorize when genes and fate were linked, compar...

Despite the importance of psychological essentialism as an account of categorisation, it is unclear what import findings of individual difference have. The present study is designed to investigate individual differences in relation to deference, a key indicator of essentialist thought. This replicates previous findings of individual differences in deference, and demonstrates a strong associatio...

HISTORIANS and philosophers of biology are, for the most part, in accord with the view that ‘essentialism’ has been the principal source of sin in systematics, and the cause of centuries of stagnation. In contrast to the ‘scientific revolution’ which began in the natural philosophy of the sixteenth century, natural history supposedly continued to wallow in what Popper has described as ‘the empt...

Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important categories. Previous evidence from Israel suggests that k...

The present paper investigates the essentialist perception of social categories and differentiates it from two closely related concepts, namely entitativity and natural kind-ness. We argued that lay perceptions of social categories vary along three dimensions: natural kind-ness, entitativity, and essentialism. Depending on whether membership in social categories is forced or chosen, people deve...

We investigated how group distinctiveness threats affect essentialist beliefs about group membership in a stigmatized fan community. An experiment conducted on 817 members of the fan community revealed that highly identified fans who perceived significant stigmatization were the most likely to endorse essentialist beliefs about group membership when exposed to a distinctiveness threat via compa...