Two studies examine implicit theories about the nature of personality characteristics, asking whether they are understood as underlying essences. Consistent with the hypothesis, essentialist beliefs about personality formed a coherent and replicable set. Personality characteristics differed systematically in the extent to which they were judged to be discrete, biologically based, immutable, informative, consistent across situations, and deeply inherent within the person. In Study 1, the extent to which characteristics were essentialized was positively associated with their perceived desirability, prevalence, and emotionality. In Study 2, essentialized characteristics were judged to be particularly important for defining people’s identity, for forming impressions of
people, and for communicating about a third person. The findings indicate that people understand some personality attributes in an essentialist fashion, that these attributes are taken to be valued elements of a shared human nature, and that they are particularly central to social identity and judgment.
Psychologists have recently begun to examine laypeople’s beliefs about the nature of social categories. A growing body of theory and research indicates that some categories are understood in an “essentialist” manner, such that a fixed, underlying essence is attributed to their members. This essence, whose nature is often only dimly understood, is believed to determine the identity of category members, to render them all fundamentally alike, and to allow many inferences to be drawn about them. Essentialist beliefs have been documented in methodologically diverse studies of ethnicity (Gil-White, 2001), race (Hirschfeld, 1996; Verkuyten, 2003), gender (Mahalingam, 2003), religion (Boyer, 1993), disease (Keil, Levin, Richman, & Gutheil, 1999), and mental
disorder (Haslam & Ernst, 2002).
Several broad conclusions can be drawn from this work. First, essentialist beliefs form a coherent set that captures perceived differences between social categories (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000) and individual differences in perceptions of particular categories (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2002). Although theorists often conceptualize the elements of this set differently, these elements include beliefs in the immutability, naturalness, homogeneity, informativeness (inductive potential), inherence, and discreteness of social categories. Second, essentialist thinking is usually theorized to be negative in its implications. Rothbart and Taylor (1992) argued that viewing social categories as essentialized “natural kinds” is a dangerous misapprehension that
accentuates group differences. Allport (1954) described the ascription of essences to outgroups as a basic component of prejudice, and Yzerbyt, Rocher, and Schadron (1997) presented it as a way in which unequal social arrangements are legitimated and naturalized. Essentialist beliefs are associated with some forms of prejudice (Haslam et al., 2002), and Leyens et al. (2000, 2001) have shown that essentialized outgroups are often “infrahumanized,” denied distinctively human emotions that are readily attributed to ingroup members.
Most social psychological research on essentialist beliefs addresses social categories. Personality characteristics — differences between people of a different kind—have been almost completely neglected. At first blush, these characteristics might seem unlikely candidates for essentialist understandings. They are usually understood as personal attributes rather than social identities, represented as adjectival descriptors rather than noun categories, and rarely serve as bases for social organization or discrimination. Nevertheless, personality theorists commonly discuss traits as if they were essences, as
Millon and Davis’s (1996) definition illustrates:
Personality is . . . a complex pattern of deeply embedded psychological characteristics that are largely non-conscious and not easily altered, expressing themselves automatically in almost every facet of functioning. Intrinsic and pervasive, these traits emerge from a complicated matrix of biological dispositions and experiential learnings. (p. 4, italics added) This definition resonates with several of the beliefs identified by writers on psychological essentialism: Personality characteristics are described as deeply rooted and intrinsic, substantially fixed, inductively potent, and at least partly rooted in biological nature. Millon and Davis’s (1996) scientific view of personality is widely shared among trait psychologists. In this view, traits are powerful sources of consistency (crosssituational homogeneity), stability (immutability), and, hence, predictability (informativeness) in behavior. Often these attributes are also understood to have biological underpinnings and to be universal. Proponents of the five-factor model, for example, have distinguished
between these “basic tendencies”—viewed as highly stable, primarily genetic in origin, and largely immune to culture and individual experience—and “characteristic adaptations,” such as values, that are more malleable, contextual, and culturally conditioned (McCrae & Costa, 1999).
Others have framed the same distinction in a plainly essentialist fashion, distinguishing deeply rooted “core” from “surface” attributes (Asendorpf & van Aken, 2003). Indeed, the only essentialist belief that does not feature prominently in scientific conceptions of personality is discreteness, as traits are usually understood as continuous dimensions rather than bounded “types” (Haslam, 2003; Meehl, 1992). This essentialist view of traits has not gone unchallenged, and critiques of trait psychology have a decidedly antiessentialist flavor. The inherence of personality characteristics has been challenged by writers who see traits as mere labels, social constructions, or perceptual categories used to judge others reputationally (Hogan, 1996) or who conceptualize traits as summaries of observable acts rather than as reified latent variables (Buss & Craik, 1983). The consistency (homogeneity) of traits was one target of Mischel’s (1968) situationist critique, which also challenges their predictive power (informativeness). The supposed immutability of personality— the idea that it is “set like plaster”—has been attacked by writers (e.g., Srivastava, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2003) who also take issue with the “biologism” of trait theories.
If the essentialist view of personality has been challenged and defended within academic personality psychology—albeit not by that name—it is unclear
whether similarly essentialist beliefs pervade implicit personality theory. Does the layperson’s folk psychology, that is, construe personality characteristics as immutable, informative, discrete, and biologically based entities that inhere within the person? Research examining this possibility is scarce, because most research on implicit personality theory addresses the covariation structure of personality (e.g., Haslam, Bain, & Neal, 2004) rather
than its ontological status. Several studies partially remedy this neglect. Semin and Krahé (1987) found that lay conceptions of personality operated at more than one tier, drawing inferences between underlying (genotypic) and manifest (phenotypic) levels of understanding. Research by Chiu, Hong, and Dweck (1997) indicates that laypeople hold a view of personality as enduring and latent dispositions (“lay dispositionism”). Levy, Stroessner, and Dweck’s (1998) work on “implicit person theories” shows that people who hold an “entity theory,” in which personality is taken to be fixed, tend to favor biological and intrinsic explanations of stereotype content. They also draw trait-based inferences more rapidly and extensively than their peers in a way that implies a belief that traits are highly informative. Heyman and Gelman (2000a) found that young children hold mixed views on whether traits are innately determined but judge them to be less heritable than physical features. Heyman and Gelman (2000b) also demonstrated that preschool children draw inductive inferences from personality traits in preference to outward appearance and do so much more strongly when these traits are ascribed to people rather than dolls.
All of these studies address aspects of essentialist thinking about personality—particularly inherence, immutability, naturalness, and informativeness or inductive potential—but they do not conceptualize these as elements of a broader essentialist view. Gelman (1992) first drew attention to essentialist assumptions in lay conceptions of personality. Commenting on work by Yuill (1992), which theorizes that people hold a realist view of traits as underlying causal entities rather than mere descriptive labels, Gelman proposed that the realist view corresponds to a belief in essences. Understanding traits as latent causes implies that they have a nonobvious basis and rich inductive potential, which may reflect an extension of a biological view of essences: People very likely transfer some of their assumptions about biological essences to their ideas about traits. For example, people may assume that traits—like essences—are innate and biologically based. The environmental impact on traits and their context sensitivity may be downplayed; their fixedness may be exaggerated. (p. 284) Gelman (2003) subsequently examined essentialist thinking about personality in a pioneering study in which undergraduates rated 12 characteristics on items assessing a variety of beliefs (e.g., in innate predisposition, genetic basis, biological underpinnings, immutability, universality). Gelman reported consistent differences between characteristics in levels of ascribed essentialism, with “politically conservative” lowest and “schizophrenic” highest, although most mean ratings were in the antiessentialist direction on the scale. These ratings were, therefore, lower than would be expected for racial, ethnic, and gender categories, indicating that personality characteristics are typically essentialized to a moderate extent.
Gelman’s (2003) study represents an important first contribution to this topic, demonstrating that personality attributes are often somewhat essentialized, that different essentialist beliefs cohere, and that some attributes are essentialized more than others. As a first step, it also has some limitations. First, the study does not establish the structure of essentialist beliefs about personality and whether the relevant questionnaire items form a coherent set. Second, the sample of personality characteristics is small. Third, the study does not investigate any factors that might contribute to the differential essentializing of personality characteristics or any correlates or implications of these differences. The studies reported in this article were designed to examine these questions. In two studies, we investigated whether personality characteristics are essentialized in a coherent way and how the structure of essentialist beliefs about personality should be described. Our studies also examine several possible correlates of essentialist beliefs.
Tags: conceptualize, crosssituational, definition, discrimination, essentialism, Essentialist, experiential, homogeneity, human nature, immutability, Intrinsic, isapprehension, personality, predictability, prejudice, Psychology, traits