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categorization
Your brain prefers a world with simple, rigid categories.
Psychological essentialism leads you to believe that objects and people have an underlying, unchanging nature.
Children and adults alike act as if members of a category—like 'gold' or 'dog'—share a deep essence that defines them, even if you cannot see it. This cognitive shortcut helps you organize the world, but it causes you to ignore superficial variations. You treat the essence as more real than the observable reality.
You judge the world by what you think things are, not by what they do.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Medin and Ortony (1989) on psychological essentialism
- What the check found
- Medin and Ortony (1989) coined 'psychological essentialism' to describe this cognitive heuristic. The definition accurately reflects the core psychological literature on the topic.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.