The Inherence Heuristic as a Source of Essentialist Thought

Humans are essentialists: they believe hidden “essences” underlie membership in natural and social kinds. although essentialism has well-established implications for important societal issues (e.g.,discrimination),little is known about its origins. according to a recent proposal,essentialism emerges from a broader inherence heuristic—an intuitive tendency to explain patterns in terms of the inherent properties of their constituents (e.g.,we have orange juice for breakfast [pattern] because citrus aromas [inherent feature] wake us up). we tested two predictions of this proposal—that reliance on the inherence heuristic predicts endorsement of essentialist beliefs,even when adjusting for potentially confounding variables (studies 1 and 2),and that reducing reliance on the inherence heuristic produces a downstream reduction in essentialist thought (studies 3 and 4). the results were consistent with these predictions and thus provided evidence for a new theoretical perspective on the cognitive underpinnings of psychological essentialism. © 2014 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc.