Essentialism

Description

Steven J. Lawrence:

"n her 2005 article “Essentialism in Everyday Thought” written for the American Psychological Association (APA), Dr. Susan A. Gelman, a professor of psychology and linguistics, defines essentialism in the following way:

“Essentialism is the view that certain categories (e.g., women, racial groups, dinosaurs, original Picasso artwork) have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly. Furthermore, this underlying reality (or "essence") is thought to give objects their identity, and to be responsible for similarities that category members share.”

Citing other authors and psychological studies, Gelman further asserts that believing individuals who belong to groups outside our own to have the same “underlying reality” (or inner thoughts or character), is a “reasoning heuristic”—a way in which our cognition takes mental shortcuts to deal with complex information expediently—that is common to people across all age groups and in all societies. Those who have essentialist beliefs, according to Gelman, “expect members of a category to be alike in non-obvious ways” and tend to treat members of “certain categories as having… an innate basis, stable category membership, and sharp boundaries.”

She also indicates that essentialism starts in early childhood “with relatively little direct prompting”, which suggests that this pattern of perceiving the supposed “essence” of other groups is a normal part of human existence.

But, she poses a question that is central to the principal themes of this One We Are series:

“To what extent is essentialism a single, coherent theory, as opposed to a disparate collection of beliefs?”.

And, she poses a larger question that I will paraphrase for clarity:

Are people who believe in the separate natures (essences) of groups that are different from their own relying on an external authority like a charismatic leader or system of ideas or have they casually arrived at their essentialist leanings in a way that is “less committal”?

Though it’s true that people will always have their prejudices against outside groups—a disparate collection of beliefs that they casually arrive at from some of their experiences and partly from the unreflective absorption of outside influences—it’s also true that throughout history, there have always been powerful factions of people, developing and teaching coherent theories that actively teach us these collections of beliefs."

(https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/group-identity-essentialism)