Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, USA.
Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Dev Sci. 2018 Jan;21(1). doi: 10.1111/desc.12509. Epub 2017 Feb 22.
Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter-group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beliefs. Three studies (N = 127, ages 4.5-6) found that experimentally inducing essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led children to share fewer resources with category members, but did not lead to the out-group dislike that defines social prejudice. These findings indicate that essentialism negatively influences some key components of inter-group relations, but does not lead directly to the development of prejudice.
心理本质主义是一种普遍存在的概念偏见，认为类别反映了其成员深层次、稳定和有信息含量的特征。来自不同学科的学者长期以来一直从理论上推断，心理本质主义对群体间关系有负面影响，但以前很少有实证工作从实验上检验本质主义信念的社会影响。三项研究（N=127，年龄 4.5-6 岁）发现，实验性地诱导关于一个新的社会类别的本质主义信念会导致儿童与类别成员共享资源减少，但不会导致定义社会偏见的对外群体的反感。这些发现表明，本质主义会对群体间关系的一些关键成分产生负面影响，但不会直接导致偏见的发展。
