Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2010
Publication Title
Social Cognition
Volume
28
Issue
3
Abstract
Essentialism is an ontological belief that there exists an underlying essence to a category. This article advances and tests in three studies the hypothesis that communication about a social category, and expected or actual mutual validation, promotes essentialism about a social category. In Study 1, people who wrote communications about a social category to their ingroup audiences essentialized it more strongly than those who simply memorized about it. In Study 2, communicators whose messages about a novel social category were more elaborately discussed with a confederate showed a stronger tendency to essentialize it. In Study 3, communicators who elaborately talked about a social category with a naive conversant also essentialized the social category. A meta-analysis of the results supported the hypothesis that communication promotes essentialism. Although essentialism has been discussed primarily in perceptual and cognitive domains, the role of social processes as its antecedent deserves greater attention.
Recommended Citation
Yoshihisa Kashima, Emiko S. Kashima, Paul Bain, Anthony Lyons, R. Scott Tindale, Garry Robins, Cedric Vears, and Jennifer Whelan (2010). Communication and Essentialism: Grounding the Shared Reality of a Social Category. Social Cognition: Vol. 28, Special Issue: Shared Reality, pp. 306-328.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Copyright Statement
© Guilford Press, 2010.
Comments
Author Posting. © Guilford Press, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of Guilford Press for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Social Cognition, Volume 28, Issue 3, 2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1521/soco.2010.28.3.306