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Dar-Nimrod and Heine (2011) presented a masterfully broad review of the implications of genetic essentialism for understandings of human diversity. This commentary clarifies the reasons that essentialist thinking has problematic social consequences and links genetic forms of essentialism to those invoking neural essences. The mounting evidence that these forms of essentialist thinking contribute to the stigma of mental disorder is reviewed. Genetic and neuroessentialisms influence media portrayals of scientific research and distort how they are interpreted by laypeople. The common thread of these essentialisms is their tendency to deepen social divisions and promote forms of social segregation.
Dar-Nimrod and Heine (2011) demonstrated that a particular form of psychological essentialism has broad implications for how people understand human diversity. Essentialist thinking attaches to the same social distinctions that are the focus of some of the most troubling forms of prejudice and discrimination—race, gender, sexuality, and mental disorder—and Dar-Nimrod and Heine show that this link is no accident. In particular, they demonstrate that laypeople's understandings of the genetic underpinnings of human attributes and groups are often essentialist in nature and commonly have negative implications for social attitudes and behavior.
Why should a belief in fixed, identity-determining essences or natures—whether understood in a modern idiom of genes and brain abnormalities or through older ideas of “blood” and spirits—have adverse implications for how people think about differences between people? The answer appears to be complex, and needs to be unpacked. First, if differences among people are fixed, then there is no hope that they can be reduced: the marginalized and deviant are destined to remain so. Second, if differences among people are seen as natural, they are inferred to be fundamentally and even morally correct. Inequalities among essentialized groups are therefore seen as inevitable and justified. Third, essentialism represents groups as fundamentally and categorically distinct. If...