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This study examines beliefs about the ontological status of social categories, asking whether their members are understood to share fixed, inhering essences or natures. Forty social categories were rated on nine elements of essentialism. These elements formed two independent dimensions, representing the degrees to which categories are understood as natural kinds and as coherent entities with inhering cores ('entitativity' or reification), respectively. Reification was negatively associated with categories' evaluative status, especially among those categories understood to be natural kinds. Essentialism is not a unitary syndrome of social beliefs, and is not monolithically associated with devaluation and prejudice, but it illuminates several aspects of social categorization.
In recent years, `essentialism' has emerged as a key concept in a variety of intellectual arenas, and has been invoked with increasing frequency within psychology. More recently still, it has begun to find its way into social psychology, where it has generated a small flurry of research and theory (e.g. Fiske, 1998; Hirschfeld, 1996; McGarty, Haslam, Hutchinson, & Grace, 1995; Rothbart & Taylor, 1992; Yzerbyt, Rocher, & Schadron, 1997). Despite its growing popularity, the concept of essentialism suffers from a lack of definition, owing in large part to the diversity of domains in which it has been put to work. Before its pertinence to the analysis of social categorization can be established and its subtleties clarified, its varied uses must be surveyed.
In the philosophy of language, essentialism refers to the classical or Aristotelian view of concepts, according to which each concept has a set of necessary or defining (i.e. `essential') features. The concept applies only when these necessary conditions are fully satisfied, so the concept refers in an all-or-nothing fashion to a discrete class of phenomena. Opposed to this view is the Wittgensteinian account of concepts as family resemblance structures with graded or `fuzzy' membership, which was elaborated by Rosch into prototype theory (e.g. Rosch, 1973).
Elsewhere in the philosophy of language, essentialism has been defended by proponents of the theory of direct reference and of `naturalized epistemology' (e.g. Kornblith, 1993; Kripke, 1980; Quine, 1977). These philosophers argue that socalled `natural kinds '-such as `tiger', `gold' and `water'-are properly understood to have essences, in the sense of necessary microstructures that give rise to their outward properties and that...