Natural origins of social essentialism: Ethnic groups, identities, and cultural transmission

Abstract

This paper argues that the term ‘social essence’ is overused in psychological research and includes instances that are not covered by the basic definition of an essentialist cognition with living beings. Imagining an essence of living beings is conceptualized as a meta-cognition that wraps up an exemplars' characteristics as a marker and assigns it a kind or species. This paper develops a framework of how social essentialism can be conceptualised to originate in natural contexts. Ethnic groups maintain a group identity that is defined by a set of diacritical markers and secured by a rule of endogamy, which functionally replicates the procreative pattern in animal species. This ‘functional homological’ relationship construes a group identity in the image of animal kinds. Thus construed, an ethnic identity appears as a natural given that safeguards the group’s cohesion and stability across generations. Hence, group-related essentialism primarily serves identity formation and provides a cognitive mechanism to distinguish the ingroup from outgroups. The intuition of an essentialised identity is perpetuated across generations by bio-social processes of enculturation. Such processes can explain an historically stable group essentialism, as well as group-biased judgements in former and contemporary societies without the need for innate sources of psychological essentialism.