Humans are essentialists: They believe hidden “essences” underlie membership in natural and social kinds. Although essentialism has well-established implications for important societal issues (e.g., discrimination), little is known about its origins. According to a recent proposal, essentialism emerges from a broader inherence heuristic—an intuitive tendency to explain patterns in terms of the ...

It has been claimed that certain forms of individual essentialism render the Theory of Natural Selection unable to explain why any given individual has the traits it does. Here, three reasons are offered why the Theory ought to ignore these forms of essentialism. First, the trait-distributions explained by population genetics supervene on individual-level causal links, and thus selection must h...

Racial essentialism refers to the widely held belief that race is a biological, stable, and natural category. Although research finds very little evidence that race has biological underpinnings, racial essentialist beliefs persist and are linked to negative outgroup consequences. This study initially demonstrates that label and visual ambiguity concurrently inform racial categorization. It then...

As a social identity, religion is unique because it contains a spectrum of choice. In some religious communities, individuals are considered members by virtue of having parents of that background, and religion, culture, and ethnicity are closely intertwined. Other faith communities actively invite people of other backgrounds to join, expecting individuals to choose the religion that best fits t...

This article provides a feminist analysis of Chinese reality TV, using the recent makeover show— You Are So Beautiful (???????) as case study. I argue that notion gender essentialism is highlighted in production Beautiful, which distances show from its original American format— Queer Eye. phenomenon indicative how existing power relations influence popular cultural texts post-reform China, wher...

The present study compared indigenous South African versus African-American schoolchildren’s beliefs about aggression. Eighty 7–9 year olds (40 from each country) participated in interviews in which they were asked to make inferences about the stability, malleability, and causal origins of aggressive behaviour. Although a minority of participants from both countries endorsed essentialist belief...

We develop a formal theory of mereology that includes relations that change over time. We show how this theory formalizes reasoning over domains of material objects, which include not only integral objects (my computer, your liver) but also portions of stuff (the water in your glass, the blood in a vial). In particular, we use different mereological summation relations to distinguish between th...