Synopsis "An Examination of the Extent of the Social Imperative of Adults (in English)"
As human beings, we navigate a rich complicated social world every day. Separatingpeople into any number of social categories allows us to make quick intuitive predictions aboutthe properties that people will have, even if we know very little about them. Psychologicalessentialism proposes that we believe groups have an underlying essence which confers groupmembership and gives rise to the properties associated with that group (Medin & Ortony, 1989).These beliefs influence predictions we make about the origin of category properties (innatepotential), the extent to which members of the same category will share properties (inductivepotential), and our willingness to accept changes from one category to another. While previouswork has examined the extent of essentialist reasoning about natural kinds such as animals (e.g., Gelman, 2003), the present work aimed to determine whether adults have these intuitive beliefsabout social groups.One consequence of essentialist thinking, innate potential, is a belief that group members, by virtue of their underlying essence, will inevitably develop properties associated with theirgroup regardless of external influence. Previous work from Eidson and Coley (2014) showed thatadults reasoning under a time constraint exhibited increased innate potential compared to thoseunder a time delay. Experiments 1 through 3 expanded on this work to determine if adults wouldexhibit similar increases in beliefs about innate potential under cognitive load (Experiment 1), within-subjects for reasoning about gender (Experiment 2) or for other social groups (i.e., race, gender, religion, and political affiliation - Experiment 3). To assess innate potential, participantsread two switched-at-birth scenarios in which children were born to members of one social groupand raised by another. Then, under cognitive load or a time constraint or time delay, participantsmade predictions about the child's behaviors and physical characteristics later in life.
