Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and India

Abstract

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart would act more pig-like but denying that the recipient would become a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from the strongest version of the "minimalist" position (Strevens, 2000), an alternative to essentialism. Finally, studies asking about a broader range of donor-to-recipient transfers indicated that Indians essentialized more types of transfers than Americans, but neither sample essentialized monetary transfer. This suggests that results from bodily transplant conditions reflect genuine essentialism rather than broader magical thinking.

Transforming Celebrity Objects: Implications for an Account of Psychological Contagion

“…Furthermore, psychological contagion beliefs have been invoked to explain a number of other phenomena in various cultural settings, from people's judgments that "you are what you eat" , to people's attraction or aversion to clothing worn by others (e.g., Argo, Dahl, & Morales, 2006, to people's reactions to the consequences of organ transplants (Hood et al, 2011;Meyer et al, 2013). To the extent that our findings elucidate the nature of the essence that is transmitted from a source to a recipient in this form of magical thinking, they thus may contribute to our understanding of a broad set of under-explored issues in human cognition.…”

“…A number of researchers have proposed that this endowment involves a belief in psychological contagion (e.g., Gelman et al, 2015;Newman & Bloom, 2014;Newman et al, 2011;Rozin & Nemeroff, 1990). Psychological contagion is a widespread form of magical thinking that has been proposed to underlie how people reason about a diverse set of phenomena across many cultures (see Rozin & Nemeroff, 1990 for a review; see also Hood, Gjersoe, Donnelly, Byers, & Itajkura, 2011;Meyer, Leslie, Gelman, & Stilwell, 2013). It involves a belief that an invisible essence (i.e., some property or properties) of a source (often a person) is transferred through contact from the source to a recipient object (Frazer, 1890(Frazer, /1996Mauss, 1902Mauss, /1972Tylor, 1871Tylor, /1974.…”

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

“…Category members are thought to have innate potential that resists environmental influences (90)(91)(92). Internal bodily organs are thought to have the power to modify the recipient's behavior (93,94). That essentialist beliefs have been documented in young children and across a variety of cultural contexts suggests that essentialism is a fundamental component of human cognition (23,(95)(96)(97)(98)(99).…”

Dehumanization, Essentialism, and Moral Psychology

“…There is a substantial empirical literature on psychological essentialism. Most of these studies concern folk-theoretical conceptions of biological kinds (e.g., Springer and Keil 1989;Gelman and Wellman 1991;Solomon and Johnson 2000;Newman et al 2008) and social kinds (e.g., Rothbart and Taylor 1992;Hirschfeld 1996;Gelman 2003;Prentice and Miller 2007;Rhodes and Gelman 2009;Meyer et al 2013;Leyens et al 2003). These studies have underscored various aspects of essentialist thinking, among which the following are especially salient:…”

“…There is a reason to think that we are intuitive essentialists about individuals as well as kinds(Meyer et al 2013, Leslie 2013). 2 Sober's (1980) explanation of how Aristotelian essentialists accounted for biological variation mirrors these folk-essentialist intuitions.…”