Psychological Essentialism and Nationalism as Determinants of Interethnic Bias

Abstract

The present study examined whether individuals without strong national identity (i.e., low nationalism) would be susceptible to temporarily elicited essentialism to alter their mental representations of ethnic boundaries, and thus increase interethnic bias. To test these ideas we experimentally induced essentialist beliefs among Japanese subjects about the boundary between Japanese and Chinese ethnicities, while measuring the strength of nationalism as an individual variable. The results were generally consistent with predictions, suggesting that the activation of essentialist beliefs can strengthen interethnic biases among people without strong nationalism.

Children, Object Value, and Persuasion

“…Essentialist beliefs have been documented broadly across a range of cultural contexts with highly varied material cultures and society development, from rural Peruvian highlands to the Mongolian steppes to a fishing village in Madagascar (e.g., Astuti, Solomon, & Carey, 2004;Deeb, Segall, Birnbaum, Ben-Eliyahu, & Diesendruck, 2011;del R ıo & Strasser, 2011;Gil-White, 2001;McIntosh, 2009;Moya, Boyd, & Henrich, 2015;Sousa, Atran, & Medin, 2002;Tsukamoto, Enright, & Karasawa, 2013;Waxman, Medin, & Ross, 2007). Across these varied contexts, children and adults alike essentialize animal kinds (such as birds, dogs, or fish), though which social kinds children essentialize is considerably more variable (e.g., Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017).…”

From interpersonal to inter-ethnic differentiation

“…This is in line with the argument that Japanese are found to define their own nation with blood ties and inheritance (Chen, 1984). As a consequence of such beliefs in Japanese ethnic essence, people may justify exclusion of other ethnicities (Tsukamoto, Enright, & Karasawa, 2013). However, lay perceptions of what makes one to be identified with a nation should depend on culture and social contexts.…”

Psychological Essentialism at the Explicit and Implicit Levels: The Unique Status of Social Categories

“…Examples of the social groups that may be subject to essentialized prejudices include race and ethnicity (Gil‐White, ; Keller, ), the immigrant status (Bastian & Haslam, ), gender (Prentice & Miller, ), sexual orientation (Haslam & Levy, ; Hegarty & Pratto, ), and mental disorders (Haslam & Ernst, ). Some studies have also demonstrated that essentialist thinking can be situationally activated or “primed,” and result in online judgments about the target groups (Keller, ; Tsukamoto, Enright, & Karasawa, ; Williams & Eberhardt, ).…”