Do natural kind beliefs about social groups contribute to prejudice? Distinguishing bio-somatic essentialism from bio-behavioral essentialism, and both of these from entitativity

Abstract

Do essentialist conceptions of racial groups foster prejudice and negative attitudes? Existing literature provides mixed results. We propose that relations between essentialism and negative attitudes will become clearer in light of a new conceptualization of essentialism derived from literature on how laypersons reason about biological inheritance. Accordingly, we propose a distinction between two types of essentialism: Bio-somatic essentialism and bio-behavioral essentialism. Further, we distinguish both of these types of essentialism from entitativity, and argue that essentialism and entitativity exert independent effects on prejudice and negative attitudes. Study 1 shows that bio-behavioral essentialism—but not bio-somatic essentialism—contributes to prejudice, and that bio-behavioral essentialism and perceived entitativity exert independent effects on prejudice. In Study 2, we manipulate whether participants hold a bio-somatic essentialist, bio-behavioral essentialist, or antiessentialist theory about a novel group and show that bio-behavioral essentialism is uniquely facilitative of negative attitudes toward a negatively behaving outgroup. Finally, in Study 3 we manipulate both essentialist theories and entitativity and show that bio-behavioral essentialism and strong perceptions of entitativity independently increase negative attitudes. Because both bio-somatic essentialism and bio-behavioral essentialism involve seeing a group as a “natural kind,” our work suggests that only particular types of natural kind beliefs are related to negative attitudes.