An Examination of the Extent of the Social Imperative of Adults

As human beings, we navigate a rich complicated social world every day. Separating
people into any number of social categories allows us to make quick intuitive predictions about
the properties that people will have, even if we know very little about them. Psychological
essentialism proposes that we believe groups have an underlying essence which confers group
membership 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 (innate
potential), the extent to which members of the same category will share properties (inductive
potential), and our willingness to accept changes from one category to another. While previous
work 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 beliefs
about 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 their
group regardless of external influence. Previous work from Eidson and Coley (2014) showed that
adults reasoning under a time constraint exhibited increased innate potential compared to those
under a time delay. Experiments 1 through 3 expanded on this work to determine if adults would
exhibit 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, participants
read two switched-at-birth scenarios in which children were born to members of one social group
and raised by another. Then, under cognitive load or a time constraint or time delay, participants
made predictions about the child's behaviors and physical characteristics later in life.