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11 19th, 2008| 
STUDY 1
We have proposed that some scientific conceptions of personality reflect an essentialist understanding of human attributes, and that this understanding may also be reflected in laypeople’s implicit personality theories. Study 1 was conducted to determine whether essentialist beliefs that had been found to covary in research on social categories (Haslam et al., 2000, 2002) also cohered in beliefs about personality. Simply put, we asked whether beliefs about the discreteness, biological basis, immutability, informativeness, homogeneity, and inherence of personality characteristics form a coherent set, such that characteristics judged high on each property also tend to be essentialized on the others.We also asked how the structure of this expected covariation should be described.
Previous research and theory offer two alternative models of the structure of essentialist beliefs. Gelman’s (2003) work implies a unifactorial structure, as she formed a composite essentialism score by combining all of her items. Alternatively, previous work by Haslam et al. (2000, 2002) favors a model containing distinct and orthogonal dimensions of naturalness and entitativity consistent with Rothbart andTaylor’s (1992) description of essentialism as having distinct aspects of inalterability and inductive potential. However, this work exclusively addresses social categories, and the two-dimensional structure may not apply in the personality domain. If a different structure applies in that domain, then essentialist thinking might have different determinants and implications from those documented in the study of social categories. For example, essentialist beliefs about personality might not have the same links to prejudice and devaluation. A unifactorial structure would also cast doubt on the applicability of concepts of natural kind and entitativity in the personality domain. Given the plausibility of both one- and two-dimensional models, we made no specific structural predictions beyond an expectation of overall covariation among the essentialist beliefs.
Study 1 also tests three hypotheses about possible correlates of personality essentialism. Little is known about why some social distinctions are essentialized more than others and some possibilities—for example, visible morphology for race and gender (Rothbart & Taylor, 1992), descent and endogamy for ethnicity (Gil-White, 2001), abrupt transformation (Keil et al., 1999) for disease—do not apply to personality characteristics. Our hypotheses were, therefore, speculative. First, we hypothesized that affective personality characteristics should tend to be more essentialized than others because, according to folk psychology, emotions are intimately linked to the person’s biology (D’Andrade, 1987). As a result of this embodiment, emotion-related personality characteristics should be understood in a more naturalized manner than others. This prediction about lay conceptions of personality accords with scientific conceptions of temperament, which is normally understood to be composed of emotional traits that are substantially heritable and biologically based (Clark & Watson, 1999). Our second and third hypotheses derive from the recent work of Leyens et al. (2000, 2001), who argued that people selectively attribute a distinctively human essence or nature to themselves and their ingroup. By implication, personality characteristics should be essentialized if they are understood to be aspects of human nature. Because human nature is a normative concept, representing valued and in principle, widely shared human attributes, personality characteristics that are understood as aspects of it should be relatively desirable and prevalent. Thus, positive (Hypothesis 2) and prevalent
(Hypothesis 3) characteristics should be essentialized more than others because they are more likely to be seen as elements of human nature.
Neither of these hypotheses is self-evident. Ethnic and sexual minorities—groups both devalued and of low prevalence—have been the focus of much past research on essentialist beliefs. It has often been argued that essentialist beliefs play an important role in prejudice (e.g., Allport, 1954; Rothbart & Taylor, 1992), implying that they are associated with the attribution of undesirable characteristics; and one study finds that more essentialized social groups tend to have lower social status (Haslam et al., 2000). Nevertheless, the logic of the work of Leyens et al. (2000, 2001) is that aspects of normative human nature—of which personality characteristics are more likely candidates than particular ethnic or sexual identities—should tend to be essentialized.
Method Participants. Seventy-three undergraduate psychology students (58 women, 15 men), mean age 21.5 years (SD = 1.6), participated in the study as part of a laboratory session. Materials. All participants completed a questionnaire in which they rated 80 personality descriptors. The descriptors were systematically selected to yield a broad and evaluatively diverse sample based on an inclusive understanding of personality that extends beyond standard trait models (see Table 1). Forty terms were sampled from adjectival markers of the Big Five trait dimensions developed by John and Srivastava (1999), taking 4 descriptors from each pole of every dimension. Twenty terms were sampled from Schwartz’s (1992) value taxonomy, taking 2 from each value segment. Ten terms were derived from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) personality disorders, taking 1 emblematic term for each disorder. Finally, 10 negative terms were sampled from Benet-Martínez and Waller’s (2002) fivedimensional model of highly evaluative terms. Participants rated the personality descriptors on subsets of nine items. Six of these items assessed essentialist beliefs and were based on the Essentialist Beliefs Scale developed by Haslam et al. (2000, 2002). That scale’s original “uniformity” item was modified to refer to the cross-situational consistency of behavior rather than the similarity of category members because both refer to forms of homogeneity. All items were rated on 7-point Likert-type scales (1 = strongly disagree and 7 = strongly agree) with the exception of biological basis, and the items were written as follows: Discreteness: “People either have this characteristic or they do not: those who have it are a distinct type of person” Biological basis: “To what extent is this characteristic based on the person’s biological or genetic make-up? Write one of the following percentages in the space provided” (percentages from 0 to 100 in increments of 10) Immutability: “It is easy to change this characteristic: it is not a fixed attribute of the person” (reverse scored) Informativeness: “This characteristic has broad ramifications: it influences people’s behavior in a wide variety of situations and in many aspects of their lives” Consistency: “People who have this characteristic will tend to display it in a consistent manner, showing it in different situations and with different people” Inherence: “This characteristic is a deeply-rooted part of the personality: it lies deep within the person and underlies the person’s behavior” Three additional items were written to assess variables hypothesized to be correlates of essentialist beliefs about personality. These items assessed the social desirability, population prevalence, and affectivity of personality characteristics: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: behavior, centrality, characteristic, communicability, communication, essentialism, Essentialist, generality, human nature, interpersonal, personality, reliability, significance, study, traits