Dual Intergroup Meanings of Essentialism: Implications for Understanding Prejudice Towards African Americans and Gay Men

Extensive literature on lay theories suggests that the perception and judgment of groups are influenced by perceivers' theory of an underlying essence that causes or explains behavior that is distinctive of members of a particular group. Yet, research has shown that essentialism is positively, negatively, or unrelated to stereotyping and prejudice. Using an integrative social-developmental perspective (Levy, West, & Ramirez, 2005), I empirically tested the intuition that some essentialist beliefs (biological basis, immutability, entity theory, informativeness, and binary category) cause prejudice towards African Americans and gay men. I hypothesized that different essentialist beliefs hold different implications for the two types of prejudice and that these implications are moderated by perceiver's characteristics (e.g., status, gender, ingroup identification). Data collected from 614 participants from a community sample in New York City suggests that increasing the salience of essentialist beliefs concerning informative potential, entity theory and biological basis leads to greater prejudice toward African Americans and gay men. Findings also suggest that increasing the salience of essentialist beliefs concerning entity theory and immutability leads to lower prejudice toward gay men. The effect of raising the salience of these essentialist beliefs on prejudice was present among members of the outgroup (European Americans and heterosexuals) but not among members the ingroup (African Americans and gay men). Findings also partially support the role of gender and ingroup identification in the impact of essentialist beliefs on prejudice towards these groups. The implications of this research for theorizing on essentialism and directions for future work in this area are discussed.