title: The inherence heuristic as a source of essentialist thought.
abstract: 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 inherent properties of their constituents (e.g., we have orange juice for breakfast [pattern] because citrus aromas [inherent feature] wake us up). We tested two predictions of this proposal-that reliance on the inherence heuristic predicts endorsement of essentialist beliefs, even when adjusting for potentially confounding variables (Studies 1 and 2), and that reducing reliance on the inherence heuristic produces a downstream reduction in essentialist thought (Studies 3 and 4). The results were consistent with these predictions and thus provided evidence for a new theoretical perspective on the cognitive underpinnings of psychological essentialism.
authors.affiliation: University of Illinois, Champaign, USA salomon3@illinois.edu.
authors.forename: Erika
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Salomon
authors.affiliation: University of Illinois, Champaign, USA.
authors.forename: Andrei
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cimpian
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012933:Social Identification; D013850:Thinking
keywords: heuristics and biases; inherence heuristic; prejudice; psychological essentialism; stereotyping