Conference on Psychological Essentialism

Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Since humans apply this nearly-universal tendency not only to natural and inanimate objects, but also to social groups, essentialist thinking can have important social ramifications. Correspondingly, understanding the variables and consequences of essentialist thinking is an important theoretical enterprise. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in psychology. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language to social philosophy, philosophy of race, and philosophy of gender. While scholars across philosophy and psychology have made key theoretical contributions to our understanding of the nature and consequences of essentialist beliefs, these scholars infrequently interact with those outside their core disciplines, limiting their ability to engage in a truly comprehensive study of essentialism. In this inaugural conference of which we hope to be the first of many, we wish to bring essentialist scholars together with the goal of building a more interconnected, multidisciplinary scholarship of essentialism that integrates ideas across philosophy and the cognitive sciences.