This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism re s u l t s f rom a history of natural selection acting on human re p resentation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist re p resentational systems are especially well suited for re p resenting natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductiv...

This article introduces the notion of genetic essentialist biases: cognitive biases associated with essentialist thinking that are elicited when people encounter arguments that genes are relevant for a behavior, condition, or social group. Learning about genetic attributions for various human conditions leads to a particular set of thoughts regarding those conditions: they are more likely to be...

My solution to the problem of Dion and Theon (Burke 1994a) employs the doctrine of sortal essentialism.1 Jim Stone (2002) objects to my solution and proposes to weaken the doctrine so as to block my employment of it. Others question a different element of my solution: the maximality of personhood and thinkerhood. After opposing Stone's weakening of sortal essentialism, and responding in a preli...

Categorization ability has important implications for children’s use of information retrieval (IR) systems. This paper critiques prior investigations in the field of child acquisition of categories and discusses some of the problems with prevailing approaches and methodologies. The theoretical framework based on essentialism adopted by many researchers is insufficient for explaining certain obs...

Individuals who believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences use stereotypes more than do individuals who believe that racial categories are arbitrary and malleable social-political constructions. Would this essentialist mind-set also lead to less creativity? We suggest that the functional utility derived from essentialism induces a habitual closed-mindedness that transcends the so...

Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter-group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beli...