The study’s findings, recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that psychological essentialism—the belief that members of certain social groups share an inborn, fundamental, and unchangeable essence—is positively associated with support for social issues such as the North Carolina bathroom bill and President Trump’s proposed border wall.
“We’re showing that not only does essentialism predict how we perceive social groups, but it also draws people toward policies and initiatives that keep those groups distinct,” said Steven Roberts, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford. “So, if I’m high in essentialism, not only will I believe that men are essentially distinct from women, or that immigrants are essentially distinct from natives, but I’ll also support legislation that enforces gender segregation in public bathrooms, or a presidential candidate who promises to build a wall along the Mexico-U.S. border.”
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In addition to the proposed border wall and the North Carolina bathroom bill, which required people in government facilities to use the bathrooms that matched their biological sex (the bill has since been repealed), other examples of what Roberts calls “boundary-enhancing policies” include President Trump’s executive order limiting immigration from selected Muslim-majority countries and his recent tweet of a proposed ban on transgender people in the U.S. military.
Not black and white
The results are based on nine studies given to U.S. adults of varying racial backgrounds and educational levels. In some cases, essentialism predicted support for boundary-enhancing policies that disadvantaged some groups (transgender people, immigrants), but in other cases, the implications were not as clear-cut.
For example, Roberts and co-authors Arnold Ho and Susan Gelman of the University of Michigan, and Marjorie Rhodes of New York University, found that participants who scored high on a measure of gender essentialism supported gender-segregated classrooms that were designed to improve the educational outcomes for women and men. “Although same-gender classrooms can disadvantage students, particularly women, participants high in gender essentialism believed that they could in fact be beneficial,” Roberts said.
In another study, the researchers found that heterosexual participants with essentialist beliefs about sexual orientation supported counseling services that helped LGBTQ individuals embrace their sexual identity. Despite the fact that the counseling services would benefit the LGBTQ community, the support is deemed boundary-enhancing because it would strengthen the LGBTQ community and thereby enhance the conceptual distance between heterosexuals and sexual minorities, the researcher said.
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